Aloft with Hawkins

There was Bill Bones and Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver; Blind Pew was flailing the darkness with his crooked Cane, and Robin Hood with his merry outlaws was routing the Sheriff of Nottingham's lackeys. As visitors to the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Me., soon realized last week, this was no mere art exhibition: it was a trip back through all the hallowed haunts of childhood, from Treasure Island to Sherwood Forest to Stirling Castle. The artist? None other than famed Illustrator Newell Convers Wyeth.

He managed to give flesh and blood to the characters of Robert Louis Stevenson and James Fenimore Cooper without betraying the imaginations of generations of children. Before his death in 1945, Wyeth had turned out nearly 7,000 illustrations, murals and paintings, including 16 editions of Scribner's Illustrated Classics.

Family Reunion. He was something of a character himself. To his children, N.C. seemed "a combination of Paul Bunyan and Santa Claus"; to keep that illusion alive, he would risk his neck each Christmas Eve to stomp noisily atop the icy roof of their house. To his neighbors near Chadds Ford, Pa. --where N.C. had settled in 1903 to study under another great illustrator, Howard Pyle--and in Maine, where he subsequently summered, Wyeth was a big-hearted man, equally at home with farmers and fishermen.

The Rockland exhibition rapidly took on the overtones of a family reunion, and the whole clan was on hand to relive old memories. For not only did N.C. put his children into his paintings, he also turned his children into painters. "You had to paint in our household," says Ann, who modeled for the little girl in The Scottish Chiefs and is the wife of Wyeth-trained Artist John McCoy II. Henriette, who was one of three boys in her father's illustration for Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger, is a painter and the wife of a painter, Peter Hurd. Most famous of all: Andrew Wyeth, 49, who last posed for his father in Anthony Adverse.

Zoom to the Crow's-Nest. High-flown romance was N. C. Wyeth's special domain, but he infused it with a meticulous realism all his own. The inn in the background of the scene of Blind Pew was modeled on Wyeth's boyhood home in Needham, Mass., where he himself first read Treasure Island. "He was also a man who felt deeply about the tragedy of life," says Son-in-Law Peter Hurd, pointing out that Blind Pew was modeled on a blind man Wyeth knew. Far from mere illustration, it is a profound study of an anguished soul.

His real secret, says Andrew Wyeth, was high drama: "Look at the picture of Jim Hawkins in the crow's-nest, and you can see how he worked toward something like angle shots in motion pictures. Much as a camera does, you zoom in on things." And it is N.C. Wyeth's enduring worth that even today the hearts of oldsters and youngsters alike zoom aloft with him.

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