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Lot Essay
Executed in 1921.
A classic illustration by N.C. Wyeth, The Scottish Chiefs displays the pictorial ability celebrated in each of his works. Indeed, "his color is rich, warm, and freshly harmonious. 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 an almost offhand delight in its mastery. His compositions are massive, with the play of great bodies, or loom of rock, or rise of tree, or the bulk of something fashioned by builders. There is substance to his forms and reality to his objects. And in the moods in which these components are brought together 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." (P. Horgan in D. Allen and D. Allen, N.C. Wyeth, The Collected Paintings, Illustrations, and Murals, New York, 1972, pp. 11-12)
This work is included in the N.C. Wyeth catalogue raisonné database, titled as The Scottish Chiefs Endpaper Illustration, that is being compiled by the Brandywine River Museum and Conservancy, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
A classic illustration by N.C. Wyeth, The Scottish Chiefs displays the pictorial ability celebrated in each of his works. Indeed, "his color is rich, warm, and freshly harmonious. 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 an almost offhand delight in its mastery. His compositions are massive, with the play of great bodies, or loom of rock, or rise of tree, or the bulk of something fashioned by builders. There is substance to his forms and reality to his objects. And in the moods in which these components are brought together 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." (P. Horgan in D. Allen and D. Allen, N.C. Wyeth, The Collected Paintings, Illustrations, and Murals, New York, 1972, pp. 11-12)
This work is included in the N.C. Wyeth catalogue raisonné database, titled as The Scottish Chiefs Endpaper Illustration, that is being compiled by the Brandywine River Museum and Conservancy, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.