Newell Convers (N. C.) Wyeth (1882–1945), the father of iconic American artist Andrew Wyeth, did his groundbreaking work during the golden age of illustration in the early twentieth century. Wyeth is perhaps best known for his illustrations that appeared in the novels of Robert Lewis Stevenson and James Fenimore Cooper and in popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Scribner’s, and McClure’s.
Shortly after completing work for the 1919 reprint of Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Wyeth began to move away from illustration to focus on landscape, portraits, and still life paintings. He would occasionally reuse his old canvases, turning them upside down and painting over them, not to save money, but to be inspired by the colors and abstract shapes of the inverted composition while he painted.1 As a result, many of these illustrations, buried beneath later compositions, are known today only in their black and white reproductions in magazines and books.
