Provenance

Sale, Christie’s, New York, May 25, 2000, lot 6 (as
The Artist’s Studio, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania)
Private collection, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania

Literature

Christine B. Podmaniczky, N. C. Wyeth: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings (Chadds Ford and London: Brandywine River Museum and Scala Publishers, 2008), vol. 2, p. 709, no. L 28.

The colorful and suspense-filled compositions of N. C. Wyeth, one of America’s most celebrated twentieth-century illustrators, were eagerly sought during his lifetime. Large publishing houses such as Scribner’s commissioned Wyeth to create narrative images for their books, magazine covers, and posters beginning in 1903, when his picture of a bucking bronco graced the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. The artist’s popularity rose, and soon his illustrations demanded as much attention as the literature they enhanced.^[1]

Although today illustrations are celebrated as an art form equal to fine-art paintings, that was not the case during Wyeth’s career. As the artist recognized, “There is a very depressing belief among painters that illustration is not an art but a craft, that it is not conceived from inspirational sources, but is built and fashioned as a stage-setting would be around the theme of a story, or planned like an ingenious design.”^[2] For this reason, he searched for what he believed was a more valid art form in which to ensure his legacy while paying the bills with his illustrative work.^[3]

Not surprisingly, Wyeth accomplished this aim by turning to the century-old muse of his nation’s artists: the American landscape. As noted by Alexander Nemerov, it was through landscape painting that Wyeth felt he could “depict the larger truths embodied in nature.”^[4] In a nod to Thoreau, Wyeth felt that painting landscapes would bring him closer to his subject, as it did not require the false theatricality of illustration work. Wyeth contemplated these thoughts as early as 1907: “To paint a landscape . . . one returns home in the evening proud and happily sympathetic in sweaty clothes and burned arms and neck. To feel thus completes one’s sense of identification and unity with nature.”^[5]

Luckily for the artist, he was to find endless inspiration in the area around Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he moved in March 1908. Together with his wife, Carol, and the first of their five children, Henrietta, Wyeth purchased and built a home on a vast plot of farmland, which included a stone carriage house that he converted into his workspace.^[6] According to Wyeth’s son Andrew, Untitled (Chadds Ford Landscape with Figures under a Tree) depicts that studio.^[7] Lingering in the background, the small, twenty-eight-by-twenty-two-foot structure is complete with the glass house that Wyeth added later.^[8]

Untitled (Chadds Ford Landscape with Figures under a Tree) is unique in the artist’s oeuvre in its subject matter and style. Distinct from the well-defined realism of his dramatic illustrations, it reveals an Impressionistic application of impasto and the broad, visible brushstrokes of his contemporaries Childe Hassam, John H. Twatchman, and J. Alden Weir. Light glimmers across the surface of the white studio and foreground area beneath the towering tree at the left, while diverse hues of green, brown, and yellow are woven together to create the gently rolling hill. Couched within the landscape are two figures—a woman leaning against a second tree and her child, who rests in its buggy swaddled in blankets. Given the proposed date of production, it is possible that the pair represents Carol and one of the Wyeth’s first three children—Henrietta, Caroline, or John. The peaceful tranquility captured by the painting as well as its size and finish indicate that Wyeth was proud of the work; he favored such landscapes with the expectation that they would forward his claim as a legitimate artist.

JLW

The studio pictured is where N. C. Wyeth created his famous illustrations for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1911).^[9] Wyeth was a member of the National Academy of Design, Society of Illustrators, and Art Alliance of Philadelphia. He exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Pan-Pacific Exposition (1915), Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago; he also provided innumerable illustrations for books, posters, and magazines. Today, his work may be viewed at the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland Maine; and Dallas Museum of Art.