N.C. Wyeth 1882 - 1945

Henry William Ralston, Sr., New York
Private Collection, White Plains, New York, 1942
By descent to the present owner

The Popular Magazine, August 1911, vol. 21, illustrated on the cover
Douglas Allen and Douglas Allen, Jr., N.C. Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations and Murals, New York, 1972, p. 269
Christine B. Podmaniczky, N.C. Wyeth: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, 2008, vol. I, no. I. 354, p. 234

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N.C. Wyeth painted this recently discovered work for The Popular Magazine in 1911. The publication often featured exciting and dramatic short stories set in the frontier west of the Mississippi River. As a result, the magazine primarily commissioned Wyeth to create scenes of rural life and adventure, a job for which he was especially well-suited given his upbringing in bucolic Needham, Massachusetts. “My brothers and I were brought up on a farm,” the artist later explained of his propensity for this type of imagery, “and from the time I could walk I was conscripted into doing every conceivable chore that there was to do about the place. This early training gave me a vivid appreciation of the part the body played in action. Now, when I paint a figure on horseback, a man plowing, or a woman buffeted by the wind, I have an acute bodily sense of the muscle-strain, the feeling of the hickory handle, or the protective bend of the head or squint of eye that each pose involves. After painting action scenes I have ached for hours because of having put myself in the other fellow’s shoes as I realized him on the canvas” (quoted in Douglas Allen and Douglas Allen, Jr., N.C. Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations, and Murals, New York, 1972, p. 68).