The Art of N.C. Wyeth

"Noontime"

"Mowing"

From Under the Gables:

N. C. Wyeth believed an artist has to pour his entire self into a subject to paint it. Only one year before he completed Jim Hawkins Leaving Home, he had started his own home after marrying Miss  Caroline Bockius of Wilmington, Delaware. In 1908 he bought land in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with the proceeds from his Treasure Island illustrations and built his brick house for his young family. He wrote his mother in 1911, "How I look forward to our life in this snug little house.... Home spirit is the most religious thing I possess." And in another letter, as in 1905, he writes of how a box in which his mother had mailed a cake to him had made him homesick, as "it reeked of odors that told inexhaustible stories." (Read more.)