On Saturday, May 21, the Farnsworth Art Museum will open an exhibition of paintings by N.C. Wyeth entitled N.C. Wyeth: Painter. This exhibition will be on display at the museum’s Wyeth Center, on the corner of Union and Grace Streets in Rockland, Maine, through December 31, 2016.

Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945) is best known as one of America’s foremost book and magazine illustrators of his era. Born and raised in Needham, Massachusetts, N.C. Wyeth learned drafting at the Mechanics School and then studied at the Massachusetts Normal School (now Massachusetts College of Art and Design). He was advised by one of his teachers to become an illustrator, and he soon followed two of his student friends to study illustration in 1902 under the renowned American illustrator Howard Pyle in Wilmington, Delaware. In February 1903, Wyeth got his first commission, from Saturday Evening Post.  This was the beginning of a long and successful career in which he illustrated more than a hundred books, among them many popular novels for Scribner’s, including Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Robin Hood, The Last of the Mohicans, Robinson Crusoe, and Rip Van Winkle.

His fame and success as an illustrator notwithstanding, Wyeth also wanted to be known as a painter, an artist whose skills went beyond the requirements of adhering to the narratives for which his illustrations were commissioned. Over the course of his career, in fact, he did more than 200 landscapes, 30 still lifes, and 60 portraits and other private subjects. This exhibition focuses on some of his more ambitious independent landscape and seascape paintings, ranging in date from 1917 to 1941. These works were done in and around his two homes, his primary residence in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and a summer home in Port Clyde, Maine.

The opening will be celebrated at a members’ preview and reception which will take place on Friday, May 20 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Wyeth Center. The exhibition’s exclusive media sponsor is Maine Home + Design.