Before there was television and of a time when film was still in its infancy, N. C. Wyeth’s illustrations electrified the stories he visually shaped and annotated. As a young reader of “Treasure Island,” who can deny the urgency to read on to the next glossy illustration? Or, in excited anticipation, thumb through the pages repeatedly to the pictures ahead, so alive and vivid and full of bravado?  

In 1939, The Metropolitan Life Company offered Wyeth a commission of a different sort; a series of canvas murals that would rely less on bravado perhaps, but instead, a deep sense of time and place. They would offer an energetic and grand vision and express the spirit of national pride by celebrating the strong values that express what it means to be American. Wyeth was thrilled. The fourteen mural panels he agreed to produce would bring the world of Pilgrims to glowing life and “serve as a graphic and dramatic expression of the spirit of New England” (Douglas Allen, et al., N. C. Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations, and Murals, pg. 169).  Wyeth, an artist of unparalleled skill and fully invested in the authenticity of the characters that populate his narratives, relished the opportunity to convey the pride he felt toward his ancestral past.

“The romance of early colonization, especially that of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts, had always excited me. My ancestor, Nicholas Wyeth, came from Wales to Massachusetts in 1647. The spirit of early days on the Massachusetts coast was an oft-discussed subject in my home. I was born in Needham, not far from the town of Plymouth, to which I made many pilgrimages during my boyhood, spending thrilling days in and around that historic territory. With this as a background, it was natural that in my mind and heart should fly to Plymouth and to the Pilgrims as a fitting subject for a series of New England paintings. If then, the warmth and appeal of these paintings is apparent to those who study them, it is principally because they are, in some related way, a statement of my own life and heritage.” (Douglas Allen, et al., N. C. Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations and Murals, pg. 171)