EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 23 © 2018 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

4 horses, cattle, etc. However, Wyeth’s father had tried to restrain his son from taking up an artistic career, as “most artists are lazy, and are all starving”, but his mother stood by her son’s choice. To convince her husband that her son had the aptitude to become an artist, she had shown some of his drawings to a famous painter from the region who claimed the child had talent. As a youth Wyeth was enrolled at the Massachusetts Normal Art School, and even took private lessons with George L. Noyes, a landscape painter. It was there he met Clifford Ashley, a budding artist who had just been accepted intoHowardPyle’s newart school atWilmington, Delaware. Ashley suggested Wyeth should enrol there instead, and find a direction that suited his motivation and talents. At the turn of the twentieth century most painters came from Europe, and painting was something relegated to the few museums and art galleries around the main cities in America, where they mostly gathered dust and were only visited by the cultural elite. But with the advent of rotogravure, images could be reproduced faster than through engraving, and this, in turn, created opportunities for the commissioning of illustration by magazine editors. The fact that many of these magazines had millions of readers, also meant that whoever got a picture in one of them, would be seen by more people than if their paintings were hung in a museum or art gallery.These images, however, weren’t called “paintings”, but rather “pictures” (what we would now refer to as “illustrations”). While the average salary of that era was $400 a year, there were some illustrators who were making up to $1,000 with each painting they produced. So this was indeed a lucrative way to make a living, and one of the best-known exponents of this new artform