Book Review

The artful biographer has a pathologist's clinical objectives, a physicist's view of causality, a cultural anthropologist's understanding of folklore, kinship, and ethnicity, a psychologist's insights about the complexities of the human condition, a historian's passion for documentary evidence, and a poet's gift for phrasing and imaging. Measured against this paradigm, David Michaelis's N. C. Wyeth is a compelling and well-crafted product by such a hand. Meticulously researched, sensitively written, and beautifully illustrated, Michaelis's biography succeeds in documenting and analyzing the life of this gifted painter who became an American cultural icon of the twentieth century. His accomplishment is all the greater in light of his subject's status as a larger-than-life figure whose biography was known only in its broadest outlines through carefully tended and oft-recounted legends and fragments.

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The foundation of Michaelis's biography is a skillfully constructed narrative framework that allows the simultaneous examination of three sometimes divergent arenas: Wyeth family history and cultural traditions, those of his artistic family and its patriarch Howard Pyle, and the larger historical and cultural contexts in which they both operated. For example, the author convincingly demonstrates that the concept of "home feeling" was a commanding aspect of the world views of Wyeth's mother and her Swiss forebears, which, in turn, was reinterpreted by the artist and led him to establish the current homestead in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, still one of the family's important centers.

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