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Newell Convers Wyeth is the head of several generations of important American artists. He was the father of Andrew, Henriette and Carolyn Wyeth, the grandfather of Jamie Wyeth, the father-in-law of Peter Hurd, and the list goes on.He was born in 1882 - the same year as Bauer, Dulac and Pogany. An inveterate "drawer" as a child, Wyeth began his formal art training very sporadically, jumping from school to school (including a short stay at the Eric Pape School) and instructor to instructor until, at age 20, he was accepted into the Howard Pyle School for the 1902 sessions.David Michaelis, in his excellent N.C. Wyeth : A Biography, charts Wyeth's life, including his complex relationship with Pyle, through letters, interviews and a bit of speculative history. If you're a Wyeth fan and have resisted reading the book for any reason, I found it most fascinating and learned much about Pyle as well as Wyeth.Under Pyle's tutelage, Wyeth's innate talent blossomed. Within a year he had his first illustration published and it was a cover for a 1903 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Another early market was Success Magazine. Soon he was a regular contributor to Harpers, McClures, Scribners and others, and a steady feature at the Post.The image at right is from the December 1904 issue of Scribners.Wyeth was graduated from the Pyle School of Art in 1904 - which simply meant that he no longer had to attend classes. He continued to paint in a studio at the school for several years. He took two trips 'Out West' to soak up the ambiance in 1904 and 1906. By the time the March 1906 issue of McClures (frontispiece at left) appeared, Wyeth was established as a Western Adventure illustrator. He was much more, but a goodly portion of his early commissions were for paintings to accompany classics like Arizona Nights by Stewart Edward White and the original Hopalong Cassidy yarns by Clarence Mulford.By 1907, just four years after his first work, Outing was touting a Wyeth Portfolio, The Indian in his Solitude. The two outer images below are from this important group of paintings and the center image is concurrent. You can click on each one for a larger version and an observation about an artist whose influence upon the young Wyeth hasn't been that well documented.If I'm able, I like to add a little insight to the biographical data of the artists I profile. Finding something new to say about Wyeth wasn't easy, but nowhere have I been able to find mention of George De Forest Brush who had a tremendous influence on the Solitude portfolio. If you click on each of the three Wyeth images below, you'll be able to see a Brush painting that could easily have influenced it (as well as a larger version of the Wyeth painting). If there were just one such comparison, I could attribute it to coincidence, but there are many. I don't intend to diminish in any way Wyeth's work or integrity. I simply want to point out an influence that seems to have been missed in the various biographies.With the popularity of his color work came another major market that seemed to be created simply to showcase his art. The classic adventure tales of Robert Louis Stevenson had been in print since they were published. When the publisher Charles Scribner's Sons paired Wyeth with Stevenson and others, they started an industry that continues to this day.