N.C. Wyeth A Biography

A.J Hewat

....N.C. Wyeth considered himself a failure — which, of course, makes him a fascinating subject for biography....N.C.'s work brought him little satisfaction....Fatherhood proved his greatest source of pleasure....A beautiful stylist with long experience writing for magazines, Michaelis knows how to set up a story.
—WQ: The Wilson Quarterly

A.J. Hewat

...N.C. Wyeth considered himself a failure — which, of course, makes him a fascinating subject for biography....N.C.'s work brought him little satisfaction....Fatherhood proved his greatest source of pleasure....A beautiful stylist with long experience writing for magazines, Michaelis knows how to set up a story.
—WQ: The Wilson Quarterly

Adam Gopnik

.....[A] full-scale...study — somewhat overproduced...for a figure whose best-known accomplishments are illustrating Robin Hood and fathering Andrew....[Howeverthe] Wyeths themselves...emerge as both more likable and more Gothic than one had expected....well writtenconscientious andon the wholeenthralling. —The New York Times Book Review

Steven Henry Madoff

In this meticulous, satisfying biography, Michaelis captures Wyeth and his times vividly.
-- Time Magazine

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The violent deaths of N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), arguably America's greatest illustrator, and his little grandson in a mysterious car accident contrasted markedly with his cozy, seemingly uneventful life, which was characterized beneath its placid surface by strong, ambivalent attachments to home and family. The son of a Massachusetts farmer and a Swiss-German immigrant, Wyeth began his professional career while studying under a giant of American picture making, Howard Pyle, and went on to become famous for his own editions of Treasure Island, The Last of the Mohicans and Robin Hood. All the while, he complained about the necessity of illustrating, which seemed to him a distraction from his true calling as a painter; from an early age, he raised his son Andrew to succeed where he had failed. Michaelis' graceful, informative but unfocused biography, which excerpts heavily from correspondence in the family archives, too often reads like a series of quotations, loosely stitched together. Absent consistent diagnoses, its repeated references to Wyeth's depressions and his mother's 'nervous derangement' bog the narrative down and remain a puzzle. And although Michaelis documents Wyeth's attempt to paint landscapes, he never addresses the question that was central to Wyeth's career: did his illustrations ever succeed as art? Michaelis identifies the source for some of Wyeth's most inspired illustrations; he even finds traits of Wyeth's difficult mother in his illustration of Treasure Island's reptilian Captain Pew. Still, the book offers too much evidence -- that Wyeth was searching for a spiritual home, that Wyeth remained unfulfilled -- and not enough summing up.

Adam Gopnik

.....[A] full-scale...study -- somewhat overproduced...for a figure whose best-known accomplishments are illustrating Robin Hood and fathering Andrew....[However, the] Wyeths themselves...emerge as both more likable and more Gothic than one had expected....well written, conscientious and, on the whole, enthralling.
-- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

A measured, careful examination of the celebrated illustrator's life and art, both fused in the crucible of his family. All families have their nuclear myths and secrets, but few have as many as the famous Wyeths. Michaelis (The Best of Friends) explores the effects of those kept secrets as they traveled down through generations, influencing first parent, then child. Although this volume functions as a biography of the famous man who illustrated Robinson Crusoe and The Last of the Mohicans, it also doubles as a case study of the intimate link between the artist and his mother—a domineering, depressed, emotionally volatile woman. Henriette (Hattie) Wyeth so idealized the past—she refused to leave her childhood home—that she cultivated a perpetual state of emotional loss. As her favorite son, Convers (N.C.) shared her sentiment, her 'homesickness.' But in later years, that melancholy sometimes expressed itself as a lingering sense of failure. Yet N.C. was a prodigious illustrator, a recorder of the West at a time when the country hungered for images of vastness and freedom. In his pursuit of powerful imagery, the young artist worked a cattle round-up in eastern Colorado with a group of men known as the Hash Knife Outfit and completed a series of paintings that cinched his career as an illustrator. And yet he longed to be thought of as a real artist, to paint 'the big picture.' It never came. Michaelis charts his professional rise and personal crises with much detailed attention, but somehow Wyeth never comes to life. Stripped of his myth, the artist becomes a curiously banal figure, a mama's boy who sacrificed much of his independence for familialapproval and financial gain. Michaelis leaves no Wyeth neurosis unexplored, but his deliberate analysis—while infusing the text with a necessary skepticism—strips it of vitality.