Willa Cather and Me

Celebrating cultural highlights of 1913...
Pioneer-blogging, essay 9 on

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Back when I wrote my first Willa Cather blog entry, my fingers speed-typed:  “If you’re looking for a Cather surrogate in O Pioneers!, you might consider Carl Anderson…”

Then I had to go back and correct the line because I typed it wrong.  It’s Carl Linstrum, not Carl Anderson. So I retyped Linstrum and continued on. Next time, same thing happened. I typed Carl Anderson again. You see, Linstrum isn’t natural for me. Carl ANDERSON is very natural. My brain auto-corrects to it.

My grandfather Theodore Carl Anderson.

It must be the Swedish side of me that takes over. My mother was an Anderson, my grandfather was Theodore Carl Anderson, and my great-grandfather was Carl Anderson. (Plus, my uncle and a cousin are Theodore Carl Andersons, too!)

My Anderson ancestors would have immigrated to America about a generation after the family of the fictional Carl Linstrum. While O Pioneers! doesn’t specifically describe Carl’s background, he seems to be a first-generation Swedish-American, born to recently arrived immigrants who immediately traveled west to this small Swedish community in Nebraska. My ancestors didn’t go that far. Carl Anderson never left the Atlantic coastal region after his boat arrived. He and his wife eventually settled in Connecticut.

I can identify with Carl Linstrum, picturing him not much different from my grandfather. I could easily imagine my grandfather as a young man climbing a telegraph pole to rescue a kitten for a little boy. He was always happy to help others.

There’s another personal connection that I enjoy with Willa Cather. While she wrote far more about Nebraska, Cather’s first ten years were spent near the idyllic Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. That’s my land! I have deep roots there.  The Blue Ridge Mountains were home to my grandmother—the woman who married that first-generation Swedish-American Theodore Carl Anderson. My grandmother grew up in Luray, Virginia, just 60 miles south of Cather’s birthplace in Gore, Virginia, near Winchester. Both my grandmother and Cather retained a lifelong love of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Cather frequently shared about her resentment at being dragged off to that depressing flat prairie land of Nebraska.

Cather came to terms with Nebraska through her fiction, but if you ever get the feeling that Nebraska is a compromise substitute for her original love, it’s because her heart belonged to the Blue Ridge Mountains. I can connect with that.

Our family vacationed in the Blue Ridge Mountains last year.
This shot was taken in Shenandoah National Park
looking down on the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Reference Sources

Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice by Sharon O'Brien

Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir by Bernice Slote
O Pioneers!, the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition at the Willa Cather Archive

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price

N. C. Wyeth, Sword Drawn

Celebrating cultural highlights
of 1913...
Wyeth-blogging, essay 6 on
N.C. Wyeth's Illustrations
for Kidnapped

N. C. Wyeth 

(1882-1945)

The Siege of the Round-House, It came all of a sudden when it did, with a rush of feet and a roar, and then a shout from Alan, 1913
Illustration for Robert Louis Stevenson,
Kidnapped; Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913)
Brandywine River Museum
Bequest of Mrs.
Russell G. Colt, 1986

The Brandywine River Museum (Chadds Ford, PA) is the last place you’d expect to find a nude descending the staircase. As I suggested in an earlier entry on N. C. Wyeth, the museum’s central spiral staircase is more of a place where “Dick and Joanna might descend to the dungeon, crossbow at the ready.” A cubist nude would be wildly out of place clattering down these steps. The Brandywine River Museum is a space for Wyeths and Howard Pyles, not Duchamps.

Marcel Duchamp, Nude
Descending a Staircase
(No. 2) (1912)
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Marcel Duchamp hit big in America in 1913, one hundred years ago. His famous nude descended a staircase at the International Exhibition of Modern Art, aka the Armory Show of 1913, and that was the signal for the modern art party to begin. N. C. Wyeth wasn’t there. While the Armory Show was drawing crowds, Wyeth was in Boston attending a flower show.

It’s simplistic to divide American art into pre-Armory Show and post-Armory Show, but there’s some justification for it. In the years immediately following the Armory Show, modern art took hold in the United States. Even though many mainstream reviewers mocked the works of Matisse, Picasso, and, above all, Marcel Duchamp, young artists saw new possibilities. The new fine art was going to be abstract; realistic narrative art like Wyeth’s was old-fashioned—good enough for magazine covers.

It’s difficult to imagine that Wyeth was unaware of Duchamp’s highly controversial Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), the most scandalous of the Armory Show paintings. It was pilloried in print and mocked in cartoons. Even if he didn’t see reproductions of the work itself, he must have seen caricatures that caught its central concern—capturing movement over time. Duchamp took the fascinating stop-motion photographic studies pioneered by Eadweard Muybridge in the late 19th century and rendered his interpretation in a Modernist style, showing the influence of emerging European art movements like Cubism and Futurism.

Eadweard Muybridge, Woman Walking Downstairs.
Source:  Wikimedia Commons

Movement depicted over time…  A wildly iconoclastic thinker, Duchamp toyed with the concept, converting photographic truth into an utterly original Modernist statement. It’s hard to imagine anything further from Wyeth.  Except…

Detail of Wyeth's
The Siege of the
Roundhouse.

What was Wyeth thinking when he painted that sword slashing downward through the air, with its motion suggested by a rapid-fire succession of pale brush strokes? It’s not Wyeth’s usual precision snapshot approach—this 1913 painting shows movement depicted over time, Wyeth-style. He gives us a stop-motion sword movement, while still honing to his realistic presentation in all other regards. In the year that Duchamp offered up his famed nude in descent, Wyeth presented a sword in descent—his subtle contribution to a trendy art world subject.

The Duchamp is a smart, edgy piece. I like it.

But I love the Wyeth.

Detail of N. C. Wyeth's
The Siege of the Round-House (1913).
Brandywine River Museum

Reference Sources

N. C. Wyeth: A Biography by David Michaelis

N. C. Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations, and Murals by Douglas Allen and Douglas Allen, Jr.
The Brandywine Tradition by Henry C. Pitz
An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art

Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life by Richard Meryman

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price

Styracosaurus!

1913-blogging
One hundred years ago
in the badlands of Canada...

Last fall, I saw this spectacular display at the Natural History Museum of Utah (Salt Lake City, Utah):

Ceratopsian skull display at the Natural History Museum of Utah.
Source:  Wikimedia Commons

On the lower left, that particularly awesome skull with the multi-spiked neck fringe belonged to a Styracosaurus, discovered and identified 100 years ago in 1913.

Styracosaurus fossils at the American
Museum of Natural History.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Charles M. Sternberg, part of an illustrious family of fossil hunters, was busy in 1913 unearthing dinosaur bones in the badlands of Alberta, Canada, along the Red Deer River between Steveville and Deadlodge Canyon, a location now known as the Dinosaur Park Formation in Dinosaur Provincial Park. Along with his father and brother, Sternberg found two Corythosaurus skeletons, a Gorgosaurus, a Chasmosaurus, and a curious multi-spiked neck fringe and skull that they sent off for identification.

Based largely on the skull fossil, geologist and paleontologist Lawrence Lambe decided this must be a new genus of dinosaur, specifically identifying it as Styracosaurus (“Spiked Reptile”) albertensis (“of Alberta”). Many more Styracosaurus fossils have been discovered since then, indicating that they roamed the land that is now western Canada and the United States.

Styracosaurus lived in the late Cretaceous period, the last gasp of dinosaur supremacy before dino-Armageddon hit. Many paleontologists conjecture that these great horned dinosaurs traveled in herds. Their horns and frills certainly look like lethal weapons for defending themselves against T. Rex and other carnivorous pests, but nobody knows for sure.

Based on memories of a matinee seen at the age of nine, munching popcorn while cowboys wrangled dinosaurs, my image of Styracosaurus will forever be anchored in the great Styracosaurus-Allosaurus battle brought to life by Ray Harryhausen in The Valley of Gwangi (1969).  This, folks, is a Styracosaurus!

© 2013 Lee Price

N. C. Wyeth's Moving Pictures

Celebrating cultural highlights
of 1913...
Wyeth-blogging, essay 5 on
N.C. Wyeth's Illustrations 
for Kidnapped

N. C. Wyeth 
(1882-1945)

At the Cards in Cluny’s Cage, 1913
Illustration for Robert Louis Stevenson,
Kidnapped; Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913)
Brandywine River Museum
Bequest of
Mrs. Russell G. Colt, 1986

There’s something very cinematic about the work of N. C. Wyeth.

No, reverse that: There’s something very Wyeth-ian about Hollywood movies. Something Howard Pyle-ian, too, for that matter.

Master illustrators like Howard Pyle and his students—with N. C. Wyeth very notable among them—were extraordinarily popular at the turn-of-the-century. Before the film industry emerged in the first decade of the 20th century, magazines and books were the most easily accessible medium for escapism in the United States. And it’s probably inevitable that the images on these magazines and books became etched into the minds of America’s early filmmakers. They learned from this artwork. The incipient filmmakers learned how to frame action; they learned the art of making even relatively unexciting incidents appear visually compelling.

At the Cards in Cluny's Cage
by N. C. Wyeth.

When painting a scene like At the Cards in Cluny’s Cage, N. C. Wyeth would work much like a film director. He posed models, dressed them in period costumes, carefully framed the action, and designed the lighting to heighten the mood and convey the story. A knowledge of theater naturally played into this—with Wyeth’s closet of costumes being particularly theatrical in nature. But Wyeth was much more like a film director than a theater director because so much of the final effect was achieved by his choices of how to position elements within the frame. There’s little of the proscenium stage in Wyeth’s art.

While gambling may be mentally exciting, it’s not visually compelling. In At the Cards in Cluny’s Cage,  the swashbuckling rebel Alan Breck is gambling at cards and losing all the money of our hero, David Balfour, in the process. Bank notes lie crumpled on the floor in foreground, painted without detail but conspicuously visible from this low perspective.

John Barrymore in Don Juan (1926).

N. C. Wyeth’s use of lighting for this painting is a lesson for budding filmmakers in how to enliven a static scene. The characters are placed around a diagonal stream of bright light that precisely illuminates the details that Wyeth wants to emphasize and casts deep shadows where he wants mystery. Unlike a film director, the painter must capture all the story details in a single image. Everything counts.

An early filmmaker like Douglas Fairbanks (who began building widespread popularity as an actor-producer in 1916, just three years after Wyeth’s illustrated Kidnapped was published) was certainly paying attention. A decade later, when he was at the peak of his Hollywood success, Fairbanks implored N. C. Wyeth to come to Hollywood to work on his latest swashbuckler The Black Pirate (1926). While Wyeth chose not to go, he wasn’t really needed. The Wyeth influence was already pervasive in the art of filmmaking, and The Black Pirate was just one of many classic Hollywood movies that worked so well partly because it looked like an N. C. Wyeth painting in motion.

An atmospheric gathering of pirates from
The Black Pirate (1926).

Reference Sources

N. C. Wyeth: A Biography by David Michaelis

N. C. Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations, and Murals by Douglas Allen and Douglas Allen, Jr.
The Brandywine Tradition by Henry C. Pitz
An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art

Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life by Richard Meryman

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone

1913-blogging
One hundred years ago...

Portrait of W.B. Yeats by his father John Butler Yeats, frontispiece to Yeats’ 
Celtic Twilight (1896). 
Source: Wikimedia Commons

“For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It's with O’Leary in the grave.”

     from “September 1913”

     by W. B. Yeats

W. B. Yeats needed a front man like Johnny “Rotten” Lydon to do justice to these punk lyrics. I would have loved to have heard the Belfast punk band Stiff Little Fingers tackle this in their snarling prime. Yeats was born before his time.

“September 1913” (the link is to the full poem at PoemHunter) was Yeats’ vitriolic blast at the middle-class Catholics of Dublin, whom Yeats saw as betraying the revolutionary legacy of men like John O’Leary and Edward Fitzgerald. It helps to know a little background history (the Dublin Lock-Out and the Hugh Lane Bequest are referenced), but I think the gist comes through regardless. Yeats is pissed off.

I don’t have a punk version, but here’s an interpretation that I like a lot. Stephen James Smith is a Dublin poet and playwright. Here he reads Yeats’ poem, accompanied by guitarist and singer Enda Reilly. Smith captures the anger and disgust while Reilly provides the lyricism—a fitting way to approach Yeats when he’s in one of these moods.

If you like that one, try it again with this live performance by Smith and Reilly. The sound isn’t as good so I didn’t want to lead with it. But I love the idea of reciting “September 1913” with a pint of beer in hand.

Scottish musician Mike Scott and his band The Waterboys paid tribute to Yeats on their 2011 album An Appointment With Mr. Yeats, featuring a fairly epic folk-rock take on “September 1913.” It’s pretty good.

But I’m still waiting, convinced that the definitive version will be punk, not folk.

Because when he raged, Yeats was a punk and proud of it. (Check the image at the top. Give him a guitar. Plug it in. Turn it up.)

© 2013 Lee Price

N. C. Wyeth Inspects the Proof

Celebrating cultural highlights
of 1913...
Wyeth-blogging, essay 4 on
N.C. Wyeth's illustrations 
for Kidnapped

N. C. Wyeth 
(1882-1945)

Two Pipers in Balquhidder (All night long the brose was going and the pipes changing hands), 1913
Illustration for Robert Louis Stevenson,  Kidnapped; Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913)
Brandywine River Museum
Bequest of
Mrs. Russell G. Colt, 1986

Imagine the frustration.

N. C. Wyeth preferred to paint on a large canvas, his standard being nearly four feet high by three feet across. He filled these spaces with telling detail and invention. He worked from a wide color palette, often with great subtlety, sometimes heavily plastering on the oils and at other times so thinly applying them that you could easily see the texture of the canvas.

And then the book publisher reduced the image by 98% (that’s 98%!!!) to create an image just 6 ½ inches high by 5 ¼ inches wide. Details would disappear into shadows. Carefully chosen colors could be altogether altered. “Miserable smudges,” Wyeth called the reproductions of his work published in Mary Johnston’s The Long Roll in 1910.

But, for better or worse, illustration was Wyeth’s chosen career, so he persevered. And thanks largely to the vision of Art Editor Joseph Chapin at Scribners (Wyeth’s main publisher), the art of illustration reproduction began to aspire to a level worthy of the art practiced by the illustrators. The Scribner’s Illustrated Classics series that began with Treasure Island in 1911 set a dramatically higher standard for the industry. Wyeth was delighted.

The quality of the Kidnapped book illustrations in 1913 easily matched that of the Treasure Island triumph. Of course, Wyeth remained acutely aware that the situation remained far from perfect, but he also knew these were the best illustrated books available on the mass market of his day.

Scribners used a sophisticated four-color process. Each painting was photographed through four different filters, with each filter separating out all but one of the primary colors. Wyeth was fully involved in the proofing process, often traveling up to New York City to meet with Chapin and the printers, always striving for a faithful reproduction of the carefully composed art on his canvases.

Wyeth's Two Pipers in Balquhidder as
reproduced in a Scribners Illustrated Classic.
Image source:  The Golden Age

When I last visited the Brandywine River Museum in January 2013, I was delighted to spend time with their small but very informative exhibit of Kidnapped material, including artist proofs and first editions of the book. Even though I entirely lack the acute trained artist’s eye of a Wyeth, I could easily see the unfortunate changes wrought by the photomechanical reproduction process.

Glancing back and forth, from the canvas of Two Pipers in Balquhidder to the artist’s proof to the book reproduction, I noted the loss of detail in the background hearth. The glowing reds and yellows of the painting were muted in the proof and the book illustration, resulting in an increase of muddied browns and grays.

Printed on a glossy specialty paper, the book illustrations are remarkably well preserved. They look superb. It’s only when you compare the illustrations to the paintings on the wall (a luxury that it’s hard to achieve outside of the Brandywine River Museum!) that you realize the inevitable diminution of his vision that Wyeth had to accept.

This was state-of-the-art color reproduction in 1913 and for that Wyeth had to be grateful.

But imagine the endless compromises involved in signing off on each proof, reluctantly agreeing that each reproduction was good enough.

Imagine the frustration.

On left:  Image of N. C. Wyeth's original painting of
Two Pipers in Balquhidder.  On right:  Image of the book illustration.
Image of the Wyeth painting courtesy of Brandywine River Museum.

Reference Sources

N. C. Wyeth: A Biography by David Michaelis

N. C. Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations, and Murals by Douglas Allen and Douglas Allen, Jr.
The Brandywine Tradition by Henry C. Pitz
An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art

Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life by Richard Meryman

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

My low-resolution copies of the N.C. Wyeth book illustrations are via the beautiful high-resolution scans at The Golden Age, one of my favorite art blogs on the internet.

© 2013 Lee Price

10 Things I Love About Willa Cather's O Pioneers

Celebrating cultural highlights of 1913...
Pioneer-blogging, essay 8 on

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Ten Reasons to Embrace This Book...

A Top 10 List (in no particular order)

1.  Alexandra gets the farm!  How cool is that?  (This deathbed decision by Alexandra’s father is extremely unusual for its time.  John Bergson is a wise man.)

John Bergson says:  “Alexandra is the oldest, and she knows my wishes.  She will do the best she can.  If she makes mistakes, she will not make so many as I have made…  And you will be guided by your sister, boys…”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part I, Chapter II

2.  But Alexandra remains humble despite her success, crediting all she has achieved to the Genius of the land.

Alexandra says:  “We hadn’t any of us much to do with it, Carl.  The land did it.  It had its little joke.  It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself.  It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part II, Chapter IV

3.  Beneath her no-nonsense attitude, there’s passion inside Alexandra.  (Note:  This is my favorite sentence in the book.)

Alexandra says to Carl:  “People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part II, Chapter XI

4.  Willa Cather takes the O Pioneers! title from a Walt Whitman poem and then closes her novel with a beautiful paraphrase of a key verse from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:  “…what do you think has become of the women and children? / They are alive and well somewhere, / The smallest sprout shows there is really no death …”  (Whitman).

“Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra’s into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part V, Chapter III

5.  Cather loves her literary allusions.  In the book, Marie’s orchard sparkles with references to the Bower of Bliss in Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, the mulberry tree in the Pyramus and Thisbee legend, and the Garden of Eden in Genesis.

Marie says to Emil:  “I’ll call you if I see a snake.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part II, Chapter VIII

6.  And Cather can get down-and-dirty raunchy, too.  I think Cather was entirely aware of the implications behind her word choices when she wrote the following:

Marie says:  “I wish I had an athlete to mow my orchard.  I get wet to my knees when I go down to pick cherries.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part II, Chapter I

7.  When horror enters this world, Cather doesn’t flinch.  (Cather’s one scene of horror reminds me of a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966) where Hitch intentionally went to lengths to show how hard it can be to kill someone.  Death is horrifically painful in O Pioneers!)

 “… in a white patch of light, where the moon shone through the branches, a man’s hand was plucking spasmodically at the grass.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part IV, Chapter VII

8.  Okay, let’s lighten up.  Food is important, too, with the ethnic groups maintaining some of their old traditions.

“Marie took out a pan of delicate little rolls, stuffed with stewed apricots, and began to dust them over with powdered sugar… ‘The Bohemians,’ said Alexandra, as they drew up to the table, ‘certainly know how to make more kinds of bread than any other people in the world. Old Mrs. Hiller told me once at the church supper that she could make seven kinds of fancy bread, but Marie could make a dozen.’ ”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part III, Chapter I

9.  The old ways are respected, allowing for glimpses into the rapidly disappearing Old World traditions of various immigrant communities.

Concerning Mrs. Bergson:  “She knew long portions of the ‘Frithjof Saga’ by heart, and, like most Swedes who read at all, she was fond of Longfellow’s verse…  To-day she sat in the wooden rocking-chair with the Swedish Bible open on her knees, but she was not reading.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part II, Chapter IV

and concerning the Bohemians:  “Three big Bohemians were drinking raw alcohol, tinctured with oil of cinnamon.  This was said to fortify one effectually against the cold, and they smacked their lips after each pull at the flask.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part I, Chapter I

10.  And the melancholy sense that even as Alexandra and the surrounding community succeed in harnessing the land’s power, something spiritual is being lost in the process of assimilation.  It’s the passing of an age.

Ivar says:  “At home, in the old country, there were many like me, who had been touched by God, or who had seen things in the graveyard at night and were different afterward.  We thought nothing of it, and let them alone.  But here, if a man is different in his feet or in his head, they put him in an asylum.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part II, Chapter II

Reference Sources

Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice by Sharon O'Brien

Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir by Bernice Slote
O Pioneers!, the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition at the Willa Cather Archive

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price

Shipwrecks in Wyeth and Homer

Celebrating cultural highlights
of 1913...
Wyeth-blogging, essay 3 on
N.C. Wyeth's Illustrations 
for Kidnapped

N. C. Wyeth 
(1882-1945)

The Wreck of the “Covenant” (It was the spare yard I had got hold of, and I was amazed to see how far I had traveled from the brig), 1913
Illustration for Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped; Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913)
Brandywine River Museum
Bequest of
Mrs. Russell G. Colt

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped allowed N. C. Wyeth to indulge in a full-scale shipwreck painting—the result, The Wreck of the “Covenant”, is simultaneously one of the most dramatic and poetic of his works. In the painting, the young hero David Balfour is in the foreground, clinging to a yardarm as he gazes back at the ship foundering on a reef. But though the action is intense, the mood is almost meditative, dominated by the dark green billows of the ocean and the night sky above.

Looking at N. C. Wyeth’s The Wreck of the “Covenant” on the third floor of the Brandywine River Museum (Chadds Ford, PA), I was reminded of an exhibit that I attended last fall at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Shipwreck!” focused on the back story of an American masterpiece, Winslow Homer’s The Life Line, by looking at the roots of this great painting in the subgenre of shipwreck paintings that flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries. When they painted their shipwreck dramas, Homer and Wyeth were working in a very established tradition. It was a type of painting that allowed the artist to depict nature at its most ferocious, while embellishing the scene with narrative details of heroism or tragedy.

Winslow Homer, The Life Line (1884), Oil on canvas,
28 5/8 x 44 3/4 inches.
Philadelphia Museum of Art.

N. C. Wyeth wanted a career like Winslow Homer’s. Their professional lives only overlapped for a brief time. Homer made the leap from being considered a very talented illustrator to a fine artist in the 1880s (with The Life Line significantly contributing to his growing reputation) and then continued to develop his artistry through the last decades of his life. As Homer’s career drew to a close in the first years of the 20th century, young N. C. Wyeth was busy launching his career as an illustrator. Wyeth was well aware of Homer, very respectful of his work, and intent on duplicating Homer’s success in moving from well-paid illustration work to acclaim as a fine artist.

A comparison of the two paintings, Homer’s The Life Line and Wyeth’s The Wreck of the “Covenant”, highlights the strengths of both. In depicting a disaster at sea, both Homer and Wyeth employ similar visual elements but to largely different effects. Each of the artists places their central character (or two characters with Homer) in the foreground, clearly the main focus for the viewer. The face of the hero figure is obscured in both, by a scarf in Homer and by a shadow in Wyeth. The artists offset these lead figures with a bright mist from the crashing of waves behind them. The shipwrecks are a secondary concern, relegated to the corners, only minimally suggested in Homer’s painting.

Detail of N. C. Wyeth's The Wreck of the "Covenant".
Courtesy of Brandywine River Museum.

Homer’s painting is packed with meaning, very well explicated in the “Shipwreck!” exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But Homer’s concerns about man and nature, modern technology, and even gender relations are not those of Wyeth in The Wreck of the “Covenant”. Wyeth’s shipwreck scene has an altogether different feel, with young David Balfour looking almost acceptant of his position—passively taking in the sinking of the ship where he had been shanghaied. The ship looks ghostly with the white sails extending up into the heavens, perhaps intentionally suggesting the deaths of many of the men on board. The sky appears almost perversely clear with stars shining, wonderfully echoed by a single poetic red speck of light near the ship’s bow.

I don’t think visitors to the Philadelphia Museum of Art were particularly surprised that Homer’s The Life Line has layers of meaning. His reputation as a fine artist is well established. But one hundred years later, people still tend to think of Wyeth as simply a very good illustrator of boys’ adventure novels.

Now for just a minute forget the Robert Louis Stevenson book and take a fresh look at The Wreck of the “Covenant”. The bottom and the top third of the painting are dark scenes of calm, with the fury of nature sandwiched in the middle. There are universal implications here as well. Consider it as metaphoric—N. C. Wyeth’s vision of one man alone in a universe both beautiful and threatening.

Detail of N. C. Wyeth's The Wreck of the "Covenant".
Courtesy of Brandywine River Museum.

Reference Sources

N. C. Wyeth: A Biography by David Michaelis

N. C. Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations, and Murals by Douglas Allen and Douglas Allen, Jr.
The Brandywine Tradition by Henry C. Pitz
An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art

Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life by Richard Meryman

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price

Alexandra Bergson and the Girl with the White Parasol

Celebrating cultural highlights of 1913...
Pioneer-blogging, essay 7 on

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

“A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember.”

                                          Everett Sloane as Mr. Bernstein

                                          Citizen Kane (1941)

I’m watching a scene from Citizen Kane, one of the world’s greatest movies, and thinking about O Pioneers! Midway through their stories, both the Orson Welles’ movie and the Willa Cather book pause for a grace moment—the first a story told across a large office desk and the other a memory on the windy plains of Nebraska. Neither scene is essential to the plot but each lingers in the mind long afterward.

Mr. Bernstein, Charles Foster Kane’s loyal business manager, explains to the reporter Thompson that surprising things can stick in a person’s head:

“You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

Roll the film:

It’s a sublime scene, sensitively acted by Everett Sloane and evocatively written by Herman Mankiewicz. Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland shoot it straight, with just a slow dolly toward Sloane as he reminisces.

In O Pioneers!, our heroine Alexandra Bergson recalls a similar memory. It comes in the book’s third part, “Winter Memories,” dealing with a lonely time when Alexandra is feeling abandoned, missing the presence of her brother Emil and her friend Carl. She thinks back to a day when she and Emil shared a special moment by the river.  It involved a duck.

“When Emil said he was he was hungry, they drew back from the road, gave Brigham his oats among the bushes, and climbed up to the top of a grassy bluff to eat their lunch under the shade of some little elm trees. The river was clear there, and shallow, since there had been no rain, and it ran in ripples over the sparkling sand. Under the overhanging willows of the opposite bank there was an inlet where the water was deeper and flowed so slowly that it seemed to sleep in the sun. In this little bay a single wild duck was swimming and diving and preening her feathers, disporting herself very happily in the flickering light and shade. They sat for a long time, watching the solitary bird take its pleasure. No living thing had ever seemed to Alexandra as beautiful as that wild duck.”

The wild duck is Cather’s feathered version of the girl with the white parasol. Like the girl, the duck is oblivious to the moment and the person observing her. Here’s the clincher line, where Alexandra sounds like Mr. Bernstein behind his desk, recalling a privileged moment of unexpected beauty:

“Years afterward she thought of the duck as still there, swimming and diving all by herself in the sunlight, a kind of enchanted bird that did not know age or change.”

You might not notice these scenes on first encounter. Not much really happens. But they’re the type of scene that can echo in the midnight hours, when you involuntarily recall a distant memory shared by no one else in the world—your own personal girl with a white parasol or your own wild duck.

Reference Sources

Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice by Sharon O'Brien

Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir by Bernice Slote
O Pioneers!, the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition at the Willa Cather Archive

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price

Howard Pyle as Action Figure

Celebrating cultural highlights
of 1913...
Wyeth-blogging, essay 2 on
N.C. Wyeth's Illustrations 
for Kidnapped

Our two heroes in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped: Alan Breck on the left and David Balfour on the right.

N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945)
Kidnapped, cover illustration, 1913
Illustration for Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped; Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913)
Brandywine River Museum
Purchased through the generosity of Mrs. Maxwell Moran and Anson M. Beard, Jr., 1996


“In Wyeth’s portrayal, Alan has (Howard) Pyle’s high brow, deep-socketed eyes, and long, straight, highbridged nose.”

N. C. Wyeth, “Alan Breck” chapter

by David Michaelis

A vibrant selection of Howard Pyle paintings are on permanent exhibition on the first floor of the Brandywine River Museum (Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania). They’re the natural starting point for an exploration of the museum. To get to the N. C. Wyeth paintings, you ascend a central spiral staircase* to the third floor. In some ways, the effect is charmingly rural (the building is a renovated 19th century grist mill), but it also summons images appropriate for the tales illustrated by Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth. Robin Hood would be at home ascending this staircase with sword drawn, or perhaps Dick and Joanna might descend to the dungeon, crossbow at the ready (one of my favorite N. C. Wyeth illustrations—from The Black Arrow).

The paintings by Howard Pyle should be encountered first—he’s the foundation. Pyle shaped a tradition of Brandywine Valley artistry that the Wyeth family embraced and ultimately transcended. Pyle was N. C. Wyeth’s greatest teacher and his mentor to the end.

And Pyle’s end came all too soon, just as the 29-year-old Wyeth was riding a mighty crest of critical and popular acclaim. N. C. Wyeth’s magnificent illustrations of Treasure Island were published in the Scribners Illustrated Classic edition, issued on October 22, 1911. Two and a half weeks later, Wyeth learned that Pyle had died in Italy. Wyeth knew that Pyle was unwell, but was emotionally unprepared for the news that his larger-than-life teacher and mentor, just 58 years old, was dead. A few months later, with the Treasure Island edition a bestseller, Wyeth was approached by Scribners to illustrate Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped as a follow-up. The art would naturally focus on the two central characters, Alan Breck and David Balfour—the crusty man of experience and his young admirer.

Alan Breck:  Detail of N. C. Wyeth's
  Kidnapped cover illustration.

In David Michaelis’ biography N. C. Wyeth, Michaelis makes a fairly convincing and well-documented argument that Wyeth used his artistic mentor Howard Pyle and his struggling younger brother Stimson Wyeth as models for the two lead characters in his Kidnapped illustrations.

Michaelis’ argument regarding the use of Wyeth’s brother Stimson as a model is rock solid. In a letter to Stimson, Wyeth wrote: “As David Balfour stands there wet and disconsolate …  in the mist and spray on my Isle of Earraid, the form and features of yourself come and go.” Michaelis suggests that Stimson stood in for an idealized self-portrait of Wyeth himself, pictured as a youth on the verge of self-discovery.

Howard Pyle.
University of Pittsburgh Digital
Library, Elizabeth Nesbitt Room.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The proposal that Alan Breck is a romanticized Howard Pyle is more conjectural, mainly relying upon comparisons between Stevenson’s descriptions of Alan Breck in Kidnapped, Wyeth’s visual interpretations of Breck, and our knowledge of Howard Pyle’s appearance. In the quote at the top of the page, Michaelis compares their faces.

Michaelis follows this with a consideration of their stature. In the Stevenson descriptions, Breck is a foot shorter than David. In contrast, Pyle and Wyeth were both solidly built men, with Pyle standing three inches taller. In Wyeth’s pictures, Alan Breck and David Balfour appear to be about the same height (although Wyeth often depicts Breck from a low perspective, making him appear more imposing—a larger-than-life presence).

Wyeth’s wonderful cover illustration for Kidnapped sets the tone for the novel, conveying its picaresque narrative and its emphasis on the relationship between Alan Breck and David. They are two men determined to take charge of their destinies. While Breck sets the destination and is the wiser from experience, David is the one who takes the lead, boldly moving into the future. Breck casts a look backwards, watching out for them both. If it is a tribute to Pyle, it’s a kind and good-humored one. The colorful feather, a fiery red against the white cloud, perfectly tops the character.

“This (Alan Breck) seems to me a gentleman of some choice qualities, though perhaps a trifle bloody-minded. It would please me none the worse, if (with all his merits) he were soused in the North Sea, for the man, Mr. David, is a sore embarrassment. But you are doubtless quite right to adhere to him; indubitably he adhered to you. It comes—we may say—he was your true companion…”

Kidnapped, Chapter XXVII

Robert Louis Stevenson

*  Elevator optional.

Reference Sources

N. C. Wyeth: A Biography by David Michaelis

N. C. Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations, and Murals by Douglas Allen and Douglas Allen, Jr.
The Brandywine Tradition by Henry C. Pitz
An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art

Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life by Richard Meryman

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price

Marie's Eyes in O Pioneers!

Celebrating cultural highlights of 1913...
Pioneer-blogging, essay 6 on

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
SPOILERS AHEAD!

I think it’s the most vivid descriptive detail in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!:  Marie’s eyes glint like the gemstone tiger’s eye.

“Every one noticed her eyes;  the brown iris had golden glints that made them look like gold-stone, or, in softer lights, like that Colorado mineral called tiger-eye.”

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Part I, Chapter I

This description comes from a passage reflecting the point of view of Alexandra Bergson, the book’s heroine.  Later in the book, Cather returns to the subject of Marie’s eyes, this time through the perspective of Alexandra’s friend Carl Linstrum.

Champagne image by
Jon Sullivan at pdphoto.org

“Carl had never forgotten little Marie Tovesky’s eyes, and he was glad to have an opportunity to study them.  The brown iris, he found, was curiously slashed with yellow, the color of sunflower honey, or of old amber.  In each eye one of these streaks must have been larger than the others, for the effect was that of two dancing points of light, two little yellow bubbles, such as rise in a glass of champagne.”

                           O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

                           Part II, Chapter VI

That slash of yellow suggests a cat’s eye, or maybe a tiger’s eye.

It’s the two artists, Alexandra and Carl, who notice Marie’s eyes.  Alexandra is an artist of the land just as Carl is an artist and craftsman, albeit an unsuccessful one.  Curiously, Marie’s lovers—Frank Shabata and Emil—are never given equivalent opportunities to pay respect to Marie’s fascinating eyes.

There are two significant mentions of Marie’s eyes during her scenes with Emil.  When Marie teases him at the graveyard in Part II, “her dancing yellow-brown eyes bubbled with gayety.”  (Notice how that description is later echoed in the mention of champagne in Carl’s passage, quoted above.)  Then in the final Marie-Emil scene when he comes to her in the orchard, she is lying on her side under the white mulberry tree and “her amber eyes opened slowly.”  Somewhat unobservant up to this point, Emil looks deep into her eyes this time:   “…in them Emil saw his own face and the orchard and the sun.”

When Ivar finds their bodies the next morning, Marie’s eyes are lightly closed, “as if in a day-dream or a light slumber.”  And this echoes Marie’s last words in the book, spoken as she awakens and Emil peers into her eyes:  “ ‘I was dreaming this,’ she whispered, hiding her face against him, ‘don’t take my dream away!’ ”

Willa Cather’s word choices are beautiful;  her subtle repetitions and echoes are exquisite.  While nothing is over-stressed, the total effect becomes almost symphonic as the imagery and themes crescendo toward the emotionally devastating conclusion.  This is the work of a master writer, confidently in control of her art.

"...her amber eyes opened slowly."
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Reference Sources

Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice by Sharon O'Brien
Willa Cather by Philip Gerber

Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir by Bernice Slote
O Pioneers!, the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition at the Willa Cather Archive

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

© 2013 Lee Price