EL INICIO ANTES DEL COMIENZO | Christa Zaat

Christa Zaat



Newell Convers Wyeth (American artist and illustrator) 1882 - 1945
Pioneers - The Opening of the Prairies, ca. 1916
oil on canvas
101.6 x 162.6 cm. (40 x 64 in.)
signed N.C. Wyeth, l.l.
private collection

Scribner's Magazine, vol. 59, no. 1, January 1916, illustrated in color as frontispiece.

Catalogue Note Sotheby's
Pioneers - The Opening of the Prairies was first published as the illustrated frontispiece of the January 1916 issue of Scribner's Magazine. By 1935, the image had reappeared in nearly half-a-dozen books on American history. Wyeth's lucrative and long term relationship with Charles Scribner's Sons publishing house began in 1904, but the terms of his commissions were inconsistent and no contracts survive, if in fact there were any. Wyeth once said in a letter to his mother "Contracts are a blight on my artistic ardor and turn me into too much of a machine." It is not known whether Pioneers - The Opening of the Prairies was a commissioned work or one Wyeth submitted to Scribner's on speculation.
Wyeth's attention to detail during the early stages of his career established his reputation as a historian and scholar. According to Christine Podmaniczky, "Historical accuracy in costumes and setting was vital to Wyeth, to his editors, and to the reading public, and throughout his career he made extensive use of both primary and secondary reference materials" (N.C. Wyeth: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, p. 28). Wyeth's extensive library covered a broad spectrum of subjects from aspects of seafaring, to English armor, to George Catlin's Indian Gallery. With these numerous resources at his fingertips, he still drew from personal experience as well. The characters in Pioneers - The Opening of the Prairies have roots in the artist's early trips west to the ranches of Colorado and the Ute and Navajo Indian reservations on the New Mexico-Arizona border. While there, Wyeth participated in a round-up, drove a mail route and witnessed a number of Native American ceremonies. He also collected Native American artifacts such as beaded deerskin shirts, moccasins and pottery, as well as a wide variety of other objects including at least three-dozen rifles and muskets from a variety of historical periods. He either received these as gifts or procured them from traders and notable stores like Kolbergh's, where Frederic Remington had purportedly purchased some of his Western artifacts. While he never intended to faithfully copy these objects into his paintings, their purpose was to engage his artistic imagination and serve as tangible inspiration for his paintings.

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Newell Convers Wyeth was encouraged to draw when he was a child. When he was about 20 years old he began working for a magazine, the Saturday Evening Post. They sent him to study southwest culture and for three months he lived among the Indians and herded sheep. He sketched and painted pictures to show what life was like among the Indians. He married and he and his wife raised five children. Their son Andrew became one of America's foremost artists. Andrew, who was ill when he was a child, was homeschooled and his father taught him how to be an artist. Two more of their children, Henrietta and Carolyn, and also their grandson, Jamie, (Andrew's son) became artists. Jamie, when he was 21, painted a portrait of John F. Kennedy. Jamie had also been homeschooled and trained by his father.

N.C. studied with Howard Pyle, a man who gave free art lessons to students that he thought had a lot of artistic ability. Wyeth became a book illustrator. The first book he illustrated was Robert Lewis Stevenson's Treasure Island. During his lifetime he drew and painted about 3,000 pictures and illustrated 112 books. In the 1930's he began painting a set of large murals for a life insurance company, but he and one of his grandsons were both killed in a car accident in 1945. His son Andrew and his son-in-law finished the work.