N.C. WYETH
Emerging into an Opening...
(Detail)
1925, oil on canvas, 39 x 40 in.
Photograph by Herb Brunell, courtesy of Hurd LaRinconada Gallery
Collection of Michael Hurd

"What a great read this book is! I couldn’t put it down. David Michaelis, with impeccable scholarship and narrative prose befitting the finest of American letters, has brought N. C. Wyeth to life—and it is an unflinching and unvarnished portrait. It is, remarkably, not so much a portrait of an artist as it is a portrait of a man. A man endowed with enormous gifts who was demonized with omnipresent, almost crippling self-doubt. A big-hearted man who put his family above everything even when the costs, both emotional and financial, were crippling. In short, it is a portrait of a man who was susceptible to all the frailties and foibles of being human, portrayed by Michaelis (as Wyeth himself portrayed his characters) like the guy next door. Here is a man who, despite a self-pitying and overbearing mother and a duplicitous and hypocritical mentor, manages—finally—to begin to think for himself, only to be eclipsed by the genius of his own son. And then…tragedy strikes. I think that N. C. Wyeth: A Biography should be required reading for all artists, illustrators, art students, art teachers, art directors, art dealers, art collectors, publishers, editors, parents & lovers—and anyone else who wants to read a damned good book."

BARRY MOSER, American-Book-Award-winning wood engraver and watercolorist of such works as Frankenstein, Moby Dick, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, A River Runs Through It, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, When Willard Met Babe Ruth.

An American painting dynasty is portrayed in this huge, riveting biography of N.C. Wyeth.

The first full-scale biography of the great American illustrator whose vision of Robin Hood, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, The Last of the Mohicans, and other classics has resonated in the minds of generations of Americans. The story of a man who, despite his immense success, believed he was a failure as an artist—never seeing himself as the serious painter that his son Andrew and grandson Jamie were later proclaimed to be.

Instead, N. C. Wyeth found in fatherhood his most satisfying achievement. Although his own childhood was anything but idyllic—and we see how his mother's instability and his father's rigidity set the stage for his profoundly divided personality—N.C. Wyeth made an enchanting world for his children. He held them enthralled through their adult lives. He shepherded his daughter Ann's career as a composer, and taught his daughters Henriette and Caroline, and his son Andrew (N. C. was Andrew's only teacher), to paint.

Six years in the making, N. C. Wyeth: A Biography is based on unrestricted access to thousands of unpublished family papers and scores of interviews with N. C. Wyeth's surviving children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces, nephews, cousins, and Brandywine Valley neighbors. In May 1993, Betsy and Andrew Wyeth opened the Wyeth Family Archives to the author. There, in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, housed in a 17th-century gristmill where Wyeth had studied painting with Howard Pyle, was a repository of more than 10,000 items, including thousands of previously unexamined letters, diaries, scrapbooks, and family papers, reaching back to the 1850's—a vast written and visual record of five generations.

David Michaelis has given us a fully realized portrait of a huge-spirited, deeply complicated man, a nurturing father, an artist whose theme was conflict—illustration after illustration pictured two men locked in struggle. And we see, through three Wyeth generations, a charismatic family and an idyllic America that was fast vanishing.

"The Wyeths, like the Kennedys or the Roosevelts, are a great American dynasty— a 'federal family,' as David Michaelis calls them. The patriarchal N. C. Wyeth emerges in Michaelis' nuanced prose as a tragic figure worthy of Dreiser—a man of capacious ambition and appetite, divided against himself. Michaelis brings a novelist's touch to his material, as well as a cultural historian's subtle grasp of such topics as late Victorian mourning and melancholia, the rise of American illustrators, and the changing face of fatherhood. The march of chapters is as firmly contoured and richly detailed as N. C. Wyeth's illustrations for Treasure Island. This extraordinary book restores N. C. Wyeth to this true stature in American art and introduces a compelling new voice in American biography."

CHRISTOPHER BENFEY, author of Degas in New Orleans and The Double Life of Stephen Crane