Newell Convers Wyeth
The Indian Mythmaker

Newell Convers Wyeth was the star pupil of famous illustrator Howard Pyle, and ranks near Pyle as a great American illustrator.

N.C. Wyeth was born, like so many Golden Age illustrators were, in New England – Needham, Massachusetts, an area rich in history and storytelling tradition. His mother knew Thoreau and Longfellow, and she passed her appreciation for romanticism and transcendentalism on to him. She also apparently taught him to draw; by the age of 12, he was doing watercolor paintings with some skill.

With encouragement from his family and friends, N.C. Wyeth pursued his talents, learning drafting at the Mechanics Art School, then illustration at the Massachusetts Normal Arts School and the Eric Pape School of Art.

Here he worked with George L. Noyes and Charles W. Reed, esteemed illustrators in their own right, but while he was clearly talented, he didn't really bloom there with his Artwork as an illustrator.

It was not until he applied to Howard Pyle's Brandywine School of Art at the encouragement of two friends who'd been accepted there that he found his niche. It was 1902; he was only twenty years old.

The next year, Wyeth made his first professional sale, an illustration of a bucking bronco, at The Saturday Evening Post – not just any illustration, but a cover illustration at one of the most prestigious magazines in American publishing.

The next year, the Post asked him to travel West, soaking up some of the ambiance and beauty of the American Southwest. Wyeth leapt at the chance. He worked on a ranch with cowpunchers, then visited the Navajo to find out what their lives were like.

At one point, Wyeth's money stolen, he took a job carrying mail on horseback, traveling long lonely stretches of the Southwest by himself and seeing the natural glory of Colorado and Arizona and Texas in every season and light. He couldn't help it – he fell in love.

This love comes out beautifully in his art, a unique blend of nature with humans set in it, both at odds with their surroundings and in harmony with it.

The dichotomy lends his work a tension it would not otherwise have, and his method of working – rapid strokes more akin to a van Gogh than to the meticulous detail of his teacher Pyle – was perfect for recording this unique part of America.

His humans have a uniqueness too. Unlike many artists, N.C. Wyeth did not just appreciate the exteriors of his subjects; he had a deep empathy for the interior; like da Vinci, he focused on the muscular structures beneath the skin but also on the soul that was captured within the form.

This really comes out in N.C. Wyeth's depictions of Native Americans, where the form is clearly only a vessel for the immortal Indian he sees on the inside, a being in harmony with nature in a way that his other people can only dream of. Later, he drew many other subjects that would fit within the Noble Savage framework, from Vikings to wild Scots, but none quite matched his Indians.

By 1908, Newell Convers Wyeth had fallen in love again, with Carolyn Bockius, and settled down to raise a family of artists and creative geniuses near the Brandywine School run by Pyle: Andrew Wyeth, Henriette Wyeth Hurd, Carolyn Wyeth, Ann Wyeth McCoy, Nathan C. Wyeth, and a number of famous artistic grandchildren and daughters and sons in law were all his progeny; in a very real way, Wyeth contributed greatly to populating the American realist art scene (Jamie Wyeth) as well as other fields of creative endeavor like music (Howie Wyeth).

After a lifetime painting illustrations, murals, and a few standalone pieces, Newell Convers Wyeth was killed in a car with his grandson while they were crossing a train track near their home in 1945. Despite the tragedy of his death, his legacy lives on in both his art and his grandchildren.

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