N.C. Wyeth's I shall never forget the sight...

Newell  Converse Wyeth, I shall never forget the sight.  It was like a great green sea., 1918, oil on canvas, 32 3/8 x 40 1/4 inches, Clara S. Peck Fund bequest. 94.9

The title of this painting was its caption when it was used to illustrate Vandemark's Folly, a novel by Herbert Quick. After being serialized in The Ladies' Home Journal, the story was published in book form in 1922.

Wyeth studied with prominent illustrator Howard Pyle (1853-1911) at his Brandywine School of American Illustration near Chadds Ford, Delaware, As a teacher, Pyle was more interested in helping his students illustrate stories imaginatively than in teaching painting techniques. According to artist, John Clymer (whose work is in the RMWA collection), "It didn't matter how you put paint on a picture. It's what you had to say in the picture. How clearly you said it--how much you involved yourself with each person that was in your painting."

Attracted to the West, Wyeth traveled there in 1904 and again in 1906, when he rode stagecoaches and visited Indian tribes. Back in the East, Wyeth produced more than four hundred illustrations based on his western adventures for most of the major magazines and book publishers in the United States.

The exciting unknown of "the West" lent itself beautifully to novelists and illustrators, both of whom used their talents to intensify the imaginings of what "the West" was.  Illustrators were, in a way, the idealists (like Moran) of their day.  Illustrations exist as one of the larger portions of what constitutes the genre of Western art.

After his first trip West, Wyeth wrote, "I felt reluctant to leave those brutal and rugged mountains, the dry, scorching plains. . . . The life is wonderful, strange--the fascination of it clutches me like some unseen animal--it seems to whisper, ‘Come back, you belong here, this is your real home.'"