N.C. Wyeth Defined Advertising Art

 

Foreword:  Fascinated by the design and images of American advertising, I previously have featured on this website a number of well-known artists and illustrators who have made notable contributions to the genre.  They have included Thomas Hart Benton, Norman Rockwell, Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Geisal, and Ludwig Bemelmans. This post is devoted to the acknowledged dean of American illustrators whose career spanned almost half a century, N.C. Wyeth.

One of the most successful illustrators of all time, Newell Convers Wyeth, shown here,  was born in Needham, Massachusetts in 1882.  Wyeth showed an early passion for drawing and was encouraged by his family.  Beside credited with more than 4,000 illustrations, N.C. Wyeth is famous for being the father of artist Andrew Wyeth and the grandfather of artist Jamie Wyeth— among the  most famous families in the history of American art.

N.C. Wyeth’s first illustration, published when he was 21, ran in the Saturday Evening Post in 1903.  Soon after he became in demand to do advertising art.  Here I have displayed a dozen of the artist’s commercial illustrations, roughly from his early career to his final days.  The 1906 ad for Cream of Wheat hot breakfast cereal demonstrates that the young man had a lively sense of humor.  My reading is that this grizzled old rancher has made his Cream of Wheat case into his mail box.  Although born an Easterner Wyeth early made rugged Western themes central to his artistic efforts.

In 1909 he did another ad “going postal,” this time entitled “Alaskan Mail Carrier” and advertising Champion Harvesting Machines.  They were the product of a farm machinery company located in Springfield, Ohio.  What message Wyeth was attempting to convey escapes me.  A tough looking postman has dropped his mail pouch on the ground while he has shot down no fewer than eight wolves that apparently were intent on making dinner out of him.  Perhaps the Alaskan was “harvesting.”

Guns were a familiar object in Wyeth illustrations.  In a period encompassing at least 1909-1911, he did a series of ads for the Winchester repeating arms company of New Haven Connecticut.  Among them were the relatively benign illustration of a hunter with two dogs hunting in a corn field.  The target likely was pheasants.  The quarry in a second Wyeth effort for Remington is distinctly more dangerous as a duo of hunters bang away at a bear.

During the following decade the age of the automobile came to full bloom with car companies springing up all over the landscape.  Among them was the Overland Motor Company, originally located in Indianapolis, Indiana.  Wyeth gave  the automaker a view of their #1075 Runabout in a Wild West setting, showing riders on horseback enthusiastically welcoming the Overland to the “lone prairie.”  Lest we lose the meaning, in the upper left he shows ox-drawn wagons and labels the central image, “The West of Today.”

The Pierce-Arrow Motor Car Company was an American motor vehicle manufacturer based in Buffalo, New York, that was active from 1901 to 1938.  Pierce-Arrow was best known for its expensive luxury cars, some of which were still running in my childhood.  The picture is of a blacksmith with space in the upper right for the sales pitch.  Another automobile-related picture was done in 1917 for the Fisk Tire Company,  headquartered in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts.  It shows workers bringing balls of rubber to a ship docked in some tropical port, perhaps in the Caribbean.   Although an attractive picture, it romanticizes the often harsh realities faced by rubber workers. 

 

That lack of sensitivity is also is evident in this 1935 ad for Paul Jones Whiskey.  Jones and his successors, strong believers in the Confederate cause, in the 1930s shaped company advertising around a pre-bellum gentility that was largely a myth.  Here the Colonel is commanding his obviously enthralled black servant:  “Toby, fetch…”  A similar whitewashing of history occurred in a series of ads Wyeth did for Philip Morris on the theme “Nature in the Raw is seldom MILD.”   At left below is a heroic depiction of General George Armstrong Custer firing away at the surrounding Indians, far from the modern day view of the reckless commander.  At right, two menacing Indians look down on a group of (unseen) pioneers below them.  The text suggests Wyeth was“inspired by the fierce cruelty of the savages….”

Wyeth seems to have found other, more benign, sources of inspiration as he gave a definite Norman Rockwell look to a circa 1936 ad from Coca Cola A frequent illustrator for the soft drink manufacturer, he shows a straw-hatted boy with a pole and his dog headed off to the “old fishin’ hole.”  The lad has two bottles of Coke in his hand.  While the theme is redolent of Rockwell, the clouds that are the backdrop for the image are patently Wyeth.

The final illustration below is similarly benign.  Done for the Home Insurance Company near the end of Wyeth’s career in 1940, it depicts Daniel Boone with his family and others crossing the Appalachian Mountains to reach their new home in Kentucky.  Although Boone and others in the party are carrying rifles, a tone of tranquility is set by the woman riding a horse and tending to a baby. 

Killed in a train-car accident in 1944, Wyeth left a lasting mark on American advertising but that accomplisment is perhaps is less well recognized than his contribution to book illustration.  The artist’s ability vividly to present to his audiences images ranging from the violent to the romantic and bucolic, all done with equal skill, mark him as a master.

Note:  The information about N.C. Wyeth was gleaned from multiple Internet sources, as were the illustrations of his work in advertising.