N. C. WYETH: A Biography.

By David Michaelis. Knopf. 576 pp. $40

Like the Irish painter John Butler Yeats, the American painter Newell Convers Wyeth is known chiefly as the father of a famous son. Unlike John Yeats, N. C. Wyeth (1882–1945) doesn’t deserve the slight. Starting in 1902, he dominated the field of book and magazine illustration for 43 years, producing landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and murals. He vivified the great children’s classics: Treasure Island, The Last of the Mohicans, The Yearling. He won every possible award. Without ever asking for a raise (to his publishers’ delight), he managed to support five children and various in-laws. Yet for all that, N. C. Wyeth considered himself a failure—which, of course, makes him a fascinating subject for biography.

The Wyeths are often perceived as the quintessential American clan, East Coast pioneers holed up at the "Homestead" in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. In truth, the elegiac vision that made their artistic work so powerful had its source, as Michaelis shows, in an immigrant’s experience of America. N. C. Wyeth’s mother, Hattie, born to Swiss farmers, romanticized her parents’ homeland, finding in it all that was lacking in America and in her very American husband, Andrew Wyeth, Jr., a dealer in livestock feed. In becoming an illustrator, N. C. fulfilled his mother’s artistic aspirations (while also satisfying his bean-counting father). The price of maternal dependency, the author suggests, was a need for failure, which N. C. satisfied by clinging to "the shopworn idea of a high-low split between artists and illustrators."

N. C.’s work brought him little satisfaction. "Letters of praise," Michaelis notes, "stung him like a lash." The typically poor quality of reproductions grieved him. "I would work my heart out," he wrote, "and then it all seemed small and fleeting when transferred to the magazine page." He seldom went a season without an episode of black despair.

Fatherhood proved his greatest source of pleasure. He was the breakfast chef—pancakes—and would wake the household by playing thunderous chords on the piano. "My art vanishes into the merest speck when suffered comparison to the one Divine and tangible sensation bequeathed to us: parent to child, child to parent," he wrote. Andrew Wyeth would later say that it was his father’s "great willingness...to give and give and give" that kept N. C. from becoming a great painter. N. C. taught all five children to draw and paint, and to feel—as did he and his mother—too much. "Nostalgia," N. C. once wrote, "is a personal experience I hallow as another might a religion." Separation and loss, as Michaelis observes, became central to the Wyeths’ sense of themselves—and to their artistic achievement.

N. C.’s relationship with his son Nat was close but complicated. The only child who didn’t become an artist, Nat nonetheless married one, Caroline Pyle. In proper Greek tragedic fashion, Caroline and N. C. fell in love. N. C. refused to own up to the relationship when Nat confronted him. Not long after, on October 19, 1945, N. C. was taking Caroline’s three-year-old son, Newell, for a ride in his station wagon when the car stalled, or stopped, on some railroad tracks. An oncoming train instantly killed both grandfather and grandson. Was it a suicide—had the boy been not Nat’s child, but N. C.’s? Family opinion divided. Michaelis doesn’t try to decide, observing only that "fathers who die violent deaths inhabit shallow graves."

A beautiful stylist with long experience writing for magazines, Michaelis knows how to set up a story. That he didn’t do so here—there is no introduction—suggests that he wanted the intrinsic drama of his material to speak for itself. But given the author’s incisive analysis throughout, one can’t help wishing for some discussion of N. C. Wyeth’s place in the history of American art, and for some reflections on the mythic hold the Wyeth family exercised on the popular imagination. We don’t get anything of the kind until the final page, when Michaelis terms the Wyeths "a federal family" like the Roosevelts and the Kennedys. Surely more could have been said, without compromise or hype.

—A. J. Hewat