N. C. Wyeth

Newell Convers Wyeth was born in Needham, Massachusetts, in 1882 and first studied art at the Eric Pape School of Art in Boston. He then went on to the Howard Pyle School of Art, where Pyle became a major influence on Wyeth’s painting. After his first Saturday Evening Post cover in 1903, Wyeth traveled west in 1904 to gain firsthand experience to use in his illustrations, a tenet Pyle had instilled in him. On his first trip to Arizona and Colorado, he visited Native American reservations and participated in cowboy roundups. He returned in 1906 to sketch mining operations in Colorado. His images of the West appeared regularly in national magazines like Harper’s Monthly and Ladies’ Home Journal, and he also illustrated a series of famous novels for Scribner’s. He gained financial security through his success in illustration and was able to devote more time to painting at his studio in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.