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Lot Essay
The present work was published as an illustration for Mary Synon's short story “My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land” in the February 1912 issue of Scribner’s Magazine. The story centers on Kenyon and O’Hara, railway engineers stationed in northern Ontario with the National Transcontinental Railroad. Whilst the men reminisce about travels and former loves on a rainy day at camp, the present scene, “There fell a long silence through which O’Hara read and Kenyon kept watch at the window,” depicts a rare moment of reflection and quietude after a busy week of work.
In a letter to N.C. Wyeth, the author of the story expressed her praise for the way Wyeth’s illustrations demonstrated the artist’s “sympathetic understanding of the North Country people.” (Mary Synon to NCW, Jan. 24, 1912, Wyeth Family Archives) Indeed, the present work faithfully brings to life Synon’s scene and characters. For example, Wyeth captures every aspect of the description of O’Hara: “He was huddled up in front of the drum stove, his cardigan jacket over his coat, his old slouch hat well down over his ears, and his pipe firmly held in the corner of his mouth, as he pored over the dramatic section of a four-week-old New York Sunday newspaper.” (M. Synon, "My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land," Scribner's Magazine, vol. 51, no. 2, February 1912, p. 191)
Wyeth’s brushwork and reduced palette further set the atmosphere in the painting, drawing the eye to the men’s only sources of entertainment—the white flurry of newspaper sheets and the hints of yellow and green on what is perhaps a copy of National Geographic on the chair in the foreground. Details like the clock on the high shelf in the background and the grains of the wood cabin illustrate the spirit of lines from the story like, “I feel as if it had been raining forever and this were the only place left in the world.” ("My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land," p. 192)
Yet, even when viewed without the context of the narrative, the figures in the present painting stand as archetypes of the virile explorer, a character familiar from many of Wyeth’s Western paintings and illustrations for other adventure tales. With his shadowed face largely hidden behind his pipe and hat, O’Hara resembles the outlaws and frontiersmen from many of Wyeth’s other stories, while Kenyon’s strong stance and pensive gaze out into the rainy mist—his face a point of highlight within the moody scene—position him as the masculine hero of the composition.
As demonstrated by the present work, Paul Horgan writes of Wyeth, “He has an extraordinary skill at capturing the quality of light itself, not merely its symbolic representation in the arrangement of planes and their shadows, and he exercised it to the fullest, with almost offhand delight in his mastery…There is substance to his forms and reality to his objects. And in the mood in which these components are brought together there is an unstated spiritual quality which sets us to thinking that with all his remarkable power and command of his craft, he was always, even in his least serious work, seeking to say more than could meet the eye.” (N.C. Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations and Murals, New York, 1972, pp. 11-12)
In a letter to N.C. Wyeth, the author of the story expressed her praise for the way Wyeth’s illustrations demonstrated the artist’s “sympathetic understanding of the North Country people.” (Mary Synon to NCW, Jan. 24, 1912, Wyeth Family Archives) Indeed, the present work faithfully brings to life Synon’s scene and characters. For example, Wyeth captures every aspect of the description of O’Hara: “He was huddled up in front of the drum stove, his cardigan jacket over his coat, his old slouch hat well down over his ears, and his pipe firmly held in the corner of his mouth, as he pored over the dramatic section of a four-week-old New York Sunday newspaper.” (M. Synon, "My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land," Scribner's Magazine, vol. 51, no. 2, February 1912, p. 191)
Wyeth’s brushwork and reduced palette further set the atmosphere in the painting, drawing the eye to the men’s only sources of entertainment—the white flurry of newspaper sheets and the hints of yellow and green on what is perhaps a copy of National Geographic on the chair in the foreground. Details like the clock on the high shelf in the background and the grains of the wood cabin illustrate the spirit of lines from the story like, “I feel as if it had been raining forever and this were the only place left in the world.” ("My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land," p. 192)
Yet, even when viewed without the context of the narrative, the figures in the present painting stand as archetypes of the virile explorer, a character familiar from many of Wyeth’s Western paintings and illustrations for other adventure tales. With his shadowed face largely hidden behind his pipe and hat, O’Hara resembles the outlaws and frontiersmen from many of Wyeth’s other stories, while Kenyon’s strong stance and pensive gaze out into the rainy mist—his face a point of highlight within the moody scene—position him as the masculine hero of the composition.
As demonstrated by the present work, Paul Horgan writes of Wyeth, “He has an extraordinary skill at capturing the quality of light itself, not merely its symbolic representation in the arrangement of planes and their shadows, and he exercised it to the fullest, with almost offhand delight in his mastery…There is substance to his forms and reality to his objects. And in the mood in which these components are brought together there is an unstated spiritual quality which sets us to thinking that with all his remarkable power and command of his craft, he was always, even in his least serious work, seeking to say more than could meet the eye.” (N.C. Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations and Murals, New York, 1972, pp. 11-12)