N. C. Wyeth

(probably) Street & Smith, New York
Private collection, New York
American Illustrators Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1987

The Popular Magazine, September 1914, vol. 33, illustrated on the cover
Douglas Allen and Douglas Allen, Jr., N.C. Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations and Murals, New York, 1972, p. 267
Christine B. Podmaniczky, N.C. Wyeth: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, 2008, vol. I, no. I556, p. 302, illustrated 

This work is in good condition. The canvas is unlined. There is a stretcher bark mark at the top edge. Under UV: there are scattered dots and lines of inpainting primarily in the upper sky and a few in the man's face and sleeve.
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N.C. Wyeth painted this work for the cover of The Popular Magazine in 1914. The publication often featured exciting and dramatic short stories set in the frontier, west of the Mississippi River. As a result, Wyeth typically created scenes of rural life and adventure for the magazine, a job for which he was especially well-suited due to his upbringing in bucolic Needham, Massachusetts. “My brothers and I were brought up on a farm,” the artist later explained of his propensity for this type of imagery, “and from the time I could walk I was conscripted into doing every conceivable chore that there was to do about the place. This early training gave me a vivid appreciation of the part the body played in action. Now, when I paint a figure on horseback, a man plowing, or a woman buffeted by the wind, I have an acute bodily sense of the muscle-strain, the feeling of the hickory handle, or the protective bend of the head or squint of eye that each pose involves” (quoted in in Douglas Allen and Douglas Allen, Jr., N.C. Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations and Murals, New York, 1972, p. 68).