Newell Convers Wyeth. Newell Convers Wyeth, known as N. C. Wyeth, was an American artist and illustrator.
He was the pupil of artist Howard Pyle and became one of America's greatest illustrators. During his lifetime, Wyeth created more than 3,000 paintings and illustrated 112 books; 25 of them for Scribner's, the Scribner Classics, which is the body of work for which he is best known.
The first of these, Treasure Island, was one of his masterpieces and the proceeds paid for his studio. Wyeth was a realist painter at a time when the camera and photography began to compete with his craft.
Sometimes seen as melodramatic, his illustrations were designed to be understood quickly. Wyeth, who was both a painter and an illustrator, understood the difference, and said in 1908, Painting and illustration cannot be mixed, one cannot merge from one into the other.
He is the father of Andrew Wyeth and the grandfather of Jamie Wyeth, both well-known American painters. Wyeth was born in 1882, in Massachusetts to parents Andrew Newell Wyeth II and Henriette Zirngiebel Wyeth. An ancestor, Nicholas Wyeth, a stonemason, came to Massachusetts from England in 1645. Later ancestors were prominent participants in the French and Indian Wars, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the American Civil War, passing down rich oral histories and tradition to Wyeth and his family and providing subject matter for his art, whic