As the Great Depression savaged America, a bank in Wilmington, Del., commissioned the protean illustrator N.C. Wyeth to soothe anxious customers with an epic tribute to the bounteous land and its laboring families.
Known more by his initials than his given name, Newell Convers, he had long been a towering figure in American art, embellishing classics like “Treasure Island,” and almost a century later stands as an inspiration to the creators of modern mythologies like “Star Wars” and “Game of Thrones.”
Wyeth’s mural, in five panels, came in at 60 feet long and 19 feet high — his biggest and one of the largest ever created for a public space in the United States. For three quarters of a century, it hung behind the tellers in the downtown Wilmington Savings Fund Society, inspiring visions of thrift and industry.
And then it came down and disappeared.
Now it has re-emerged in a gleaming new round barn on N.C.’s grandson Jamie Wyeth’s Point Lookout Farm outside Wilmington and near the Wyeth studios in Chadds Ford, Pa.
And thereby hangs a tale — more than one, actually.
The 1932 work, “Apotheosis of the Family,” aims to welcome visitors by jitney from the nearby Brandywine Museum of Art by late fall, with advance reservations, tour hours and fees to be announced on the museum website.
N.C. Wyeth is enjoying a renaissance of sorts. His work will be included in the filmmaker George Lucas’s new Museum of Narrative Art, scheduled to open next year in Los Angeles. Five years ago, Wyeth had a retrospective at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, an exhibition that cited his influence on cinema. DMR Books, a publisher of fantasy, horror and adventure fiction,has hailed him as “the king” for his influence on adventure illustration.
In “Apotheosis,” which celebrates the pinnacle of family, Wyeth — in life up to 250 pounds, with a 20-inch collar — looms bare-chested dead center as a kind of superman, beside his wife, Carol, amid vignettes of harvesting, fishing, weaving and timbering as the seasons change. Pan plays the pipes, smoke boils from a campfire, and ships with billowing sails race for a distant shore. The foreground sprouts strange flowers hardly seen in nature.
Prominent among other family models is Wyeth’s flaxen-haired son, Andrew, then 15 — destined to eclipse the rest of the famous art clan with his starkly realistic landscapes and portraits — drawing a bow and arrow and nude but for a modest blurry G-string. Next to him stands his sister Carolyn as a toddler, although she was actually eight years older.
“Daddy said they didn’t pose that long,” recalled Andrew’s son James Browning Wyeth, known as Jamie, also a painter.
The work enshrines two of N.C.’s core beliefs — “love of family and the importance of land” — at a terrible time when such values were especially precious, said Joyce Hill Stoner, director of the University of Delaware’s doctoral program in preservation studies, who helped conserve the mural.
After periodic restorations, most recently in 1998, the painting was pried off the wall and damagingly rolled up 10 years later when the bank was sold for conversion into apartments.
The mural went to the Delaware Historical Society, which couldn’t place it. It was then bequeathed to the Wyeth Foundation for conservation, with Jamie, now 79, committing about $1 million for its reinstallation in a new round barn on his 250-acre Brandywine farm.
Jamie is the widower of Phyllis Mills Wyeth, a philanthropist and socialite racehorse breeder whose stallion Union Rags won the 2012 Belmont. She had worked as an office assistant for Senator and then President John F. Kennedy before surviving a crippling car crash and inheriting the property from du Pont relatives.
As a tribute to his wife after her death at 78 in 2019, Jamie opened the pastures as a lifetime sanctuary for former racehorses.
It also became a refuge for the nearly-century-old artwork.
“I just wanted to save the mural,” said Jamie, tousle-haired and bulky like his grandfather, amid his paintings of Phyllis and other subjects, including Michael Jackson. “My wife and I wanted it on the farm.”
“I adore my grandfather’s work,” he said. “He had more influence on me than my father.” Indeed, N.C. Wyeth’s works often brim with color, like Jamie’s, while Andrew’s lean to the sere and forbidding, as in “Christina’s World,” depicting his disabled neighbor crawling up a treeless hill below her forlorn-looking farmhouse.
“As a child,” Jamie said, “N.C.’s illustrations of knights in armor and Robin Hood had a lot more impact than my father’s paintings of dead crows in winter fields” — although, he added, “their combined influence was, and is, very strong.”
Jamie, who was born the year after N.C. was killed in a bizarre train collision in 1945, recalled visits to his grandfather’s painting studio crammed with old muskets and cutlasses for his illustrations.
He said he had also often viewed the mural in the Wilmington bank. A bank customer, he said, had once gazed up at the huge work to compliment “the new wallpaper.”
THE STORY OF THE MURAL’S resurrection has many beginnings, but let’s start with the Wyeth patriarch: N.C., a descendant of early English colonists and maternal grandparents from Switzerland, who settled in Needham, Mass., where he was born in 1882. His father wanted him to go into farming but he was strongly drawn to art, winning acceptance as a star protégé of the pre-eminent illustrator Howard Pyle.
By 1911, Wyeth’s own vivid illustrations were beginning to sell out book editions of “Treasure Island,” “Kidnapped,” “Robin Hood,” “King Arthur” and many other Scribner classics. In all he is credited with illustrating some 112 books, many still in print.
But “America’s greatest painter of costumed romance” — as the Boston Sunday papers called him, according to a Wyeth biographer, David Michaelis — was deeply conflicted, disdaining illustration as a lesser art..
Although some of his other children showed artistic talent, by 1932 N.C. was focusing on Andrew as the most promising. “If you’re not better than I am, I’m a rotten teacher,” he would tell Andrew, according to Michaelis.
He also urged his children “to feel very strongly about things,” his daughter Henriette recalled, “not to be lukewarm” but “wade into it and make a big mistake because you learn that way.”
As the Depression deepened, the Wilmington bank president, Frederick Stone, commissioned Wyeth to paint “the story of thrift as it applies to humanity,” to celebrate the bank’s centennial. No record of the fee can be found now but Michaelis writes that the artist’s murals were then commanding about $12,000, a stupendous sum at the time and equivalent to more than $270,000 today.
The five panels of “Apotheosis of the Family” were sturdily hung by two brothers named Wolheim. So sturdily that removal later became problematic.
N.C. proudly showed off his mural to his son Andrew’s future wife, Betsy James — leaving Andrew to redden over the depiction of his near-naked state.
N.C. was killed a few days short of 63 in 1945, along with his nearly-4-year-old grandson, Newell, when his station wagon stalled or stopped on the railroad tracks near Chadds Ford and was struck by a train. The circumstances remained unexplained.
It later emerged that N.C. Wyeth and Newell’s mother, N.C.’s daughter-in-law Caroline, who was married to N.C.’s son Nat, were romantically involved, according to multiple biographers.
(Caroline … Carol … Carolyn — the names recur on and off the Wyeth family tree.)
Jamie Wyeth said the pair were amorous but he and others in the family ruled out whispers of a possible murder-suicide.
Caroline, a niece of N.C’s mentor, Howard Pyle, once told a son, “I’ve done some terrible things in my life.” Her husband, Nat, an inventor at du Pont, forgave his wife and father. Nat and Caroline had five more children before she was killed in a car crash at 59 in 1973.
IT WAS NOT the only Wyeth family secret.
After years of marriage and fatherhood, N.C.’s brother, also named Nat, came out as gay before fatally crashing his car in 1954. And in the 1970s and ’80s, Andrew Wyeth, quietly working in and around his father’s studio, painted nudes and dozens of other portraits of a comely married neighbor, Helga Testorf — works that would sell for millions but were taken as a terrible betrayal by his wife and business manager, Betsy. Andrew denied any sexual relationship. “That’s what he says,” Betsy told me dryly in 1997.
The following year, the bank spent $40,000 on the restoration of “Apotheosis” by University of Delaware conservators, including Stoner. ”We thought it was for forever,” she said.
But just nine years later the building was sold and the mural was dismantled hurriedly, ripping away chunks of plaster with noxious lead white used as adhesive by the original installers, the Wolheim brothers. The panels were tightly rolled — much too tightly, experts later said — on 12-inch rollers, paint-side in; the paint should have been on the outside.
It went to the Delaware Historical Society. “We offered it to museums, but it was too big,” Jamie said.
With Jamie as a trustee of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, founded by his parents in 2002, the mural was then given to the foundation for installation at Point Lookout Farm with donors funding the conservation.
Displaying the flat mural in a round barn was the idea of Jamie’s assistant Caroline (of course!) O’Neil Ryan, who had managed properties for celebrities including Norman Lear and had been working for Jamie for decades.
Jamie decided to build his own barn, settling on a design with a 62-foot diameter, columned entry, circle of high windows and small cupola. The mural would take up less than half the curved wall, the rest to remain dramatically blank.
Then, Darla du Pont, the wife of Thère du Pont — an heir to the chemicals fortune and president of the Longwood Foundation, which supports the great horticultural landscape Longwood Gardens — happened to mention to Jamie that a contractor named Scott Humphrey had once innovatively lit their 100-foot Christmas tree.
Seeking someone to light the mural, Jamie reached out to him.
Humphrey was the entrepreneur behind three local entertainment companies, including Staging Dimensions, that built or lit superstructures for the visit of Pope Francis to Philadelphia and Washington in 2015. The company also lit Super Bowl-related events such as the DirecTV shows of Lady Gaga and Rihanna.
Humphrey remembered the mural from the bank. “It’s a priceless piece of art,” he said.
But, he asked Jamie, “who’s hanging this?”
“The lighting part is easy,” Humphrey said. “The hanging part is a whole other animal.”
Humphrey created mock-ups in his Pine Box Studios, nearly 30,000 square feet of rehearsal spaces in Wilmington. Then he fabricated frames of aluminum and steel on acrylic to cradle the mural panels on the wall, like, he said, “a rib cage.” The curve of the frames had to exactly match the curve of the barn wall.
But when the mural’s conservators, the husband-and-wife team of Kristin deGhetaldi and Brian Baade, veterans of projects at the Smithsonian and Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, arrived for the installation, problems emerged.
As deGhetaldi recalled, “We partially unrolled one panel and we could hear the audible cracking of the lead white.”
The canvas needed to be humidified to relax and then be flattened with sandbags. Conservators donned hazard suits because of the lead.
When the glue barrels arrived from 3M in France several weeks ago, they turned out to be expired. The company was finally able to scrounge a fresh supply of glue “sausages” from American warehouses.
Justin Phillips, a 17-year veteran shop manager at Staging Dimensions, who worked on the installation, said he unrolled the canvas a little at a time, rocking it back and forth over the glue.
“I dreaded working on this painting,” he said. “I didn’t want to touch it. I was nervous.”
After weeks of labor, the last panel went up July 30 to an audience of Brandywine museum donors.
Jamie said his work there is done now.
“I don’t think they need me here,” he said. He has a show of his portraits of Andy Warhol and Rudolf Nureyev opening at the Schoelkopf Gallery in Manhattan on Sept. 12, and he has his studios in Maine on Monhegan Island and Southern Island. He was eager to get back to his paintings.
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