N.C. Wyeth At The Portland Museum of Art

I spend part of every summer in Maine so if you asked me for a shortlist of things that said “Maine,” most of the answers would not surprise you at all. They would include a parcel of clichés like “lobster,” “pine trees,” “moose” and “rocky coastline.”

But “N.C. Wyeth” might give you pause.

Newell Convers Wyeth, better known as N.C. Wyeth, was the patriarch of the famous Wyeth family, which includes the acclaimed painter Andrew Wyeth and his son, the painter Jamie Wyeth. All of them spent (in the case of Jamie, continue to send) a great portion of their lives living and painting in Maine.

Yet while N.C. Wyeth is perhaps not as well-known as his son and his grandson, for me he is that most essential of Maine artists. Lots of artists have tried to capture the essence of Maine. N.C. Wyeth did so.

The proof is in the painting, so I suggest you drive or book a flight  to Portland, Maine between now and January 12, 2020 to take in “N.C. Wyeth: New Perspectives” at the Portland Museum of Art. It’s a great excuse to enjoy Portland without its summertime crowds, to eat exceptionally well in a place that Bon Appetit magazine named “The Restaurant City of the Year 2018” and to take in the work of this master. He was an artist who made his name as an illustrator of children’s books but was a hugely accomplished painter who came to have a profound view of his adopted state.

Wyeth, who was also closely associated with the Brandywine River Valley in Pennsylvania, spent much of his time living and painting in midcoast Maine, where he bought a house in 1920 that he named “Eight Bells” an homage to a Winslow Homer painting. 

He was famed for the intense colors in his work, which as often as not were marshalled into use as he depicted one of the bold figures that became illustrations for such classics as Treasure Island and The Last of the Mohicans. Generations of Americans grew up with these illustrations, which became the default faces of the main characters.

But it’s his paintings of the Maine coast and the people of Maine that rose far above any illustration to become 20th century masterworks. Anyone who knows the state of Maine, with all of its beauty and fierce independence and its quirks, will recognize something in these paintings.  

“Island Funeral” is a powerful 1939 painting, a bird’s eye view of an island where local fishermen are arriving to mourn the death of one of their own. “Dark Harbor Fishermen” has a seagull-eye’s view of fishermen, going about their daily chores with boatloads of herring, a brilliant composition.

“Black Spruce Ledge” is a 1939 tempera of a lobsterman pulling a trap into his dory with a pine-clad Maine island as a backdrop. I especially like “The Harbor at Herring Gut,” a rather fantastical painting that has elements of Marsden Hartley and other modernist contemporaries from the 1920’s.

The simplest and perhaps the most eloquent work of all is “The Lobsterman (The Doryman)” a tempera from 1944. They are evocative and even touching, but they are not sentimental souvenirs of Vacationland.

“N.C. Wyeth: New Perspectives” has proven to so popular that the museum has opened its door for seven days a week during its run. For those who love Maine, it’s a great opportunity to catch the work of the quintessential Maine artist on a wintery weekend trip to Portland.