My Scrapbook: Boston Blackie by N.C. Wyeth

Boston Blackie by N.C. Wyeth
July 1914, The American Magazine

THIS WAS the lead illustration for “The Price of Principle,” the first-ever Boston Blackie story and thus the first-ever depiction of one of crime fiction’s more enduring characters. It appeared in the July 1914 issue of The American Magazine, a popular periodical of its day that regularly featured human interest stories, social issues and fiction.

Painted by acclaimed American artist N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), this is Blackie as he was originally conceived by author Jack Boyle: a hardened, convicted professional thief who, upon his release from a hellish California prison, would eventually — thanks to the efforts of his beloved Mary — see the light, and clean up his act. Boyle went on to write a slew of adventures featuring the more or less reformed Blackie, published in such popular magazines of the time as The American Magazine, Redbook and Cosmopolitan.

The character would continue to evolve as the series progressed; his dark, criminal past scrubbed and sanitized, eventually becoming the slightly roguish but always slick private detective of film, radio and television.

But here he is, as originally intended. Coldly professional, the Blackie depicted here is a brutish piece of work, caught in the act (so to speak) of having just cracked a safe; a cunning and dangerous criminal in stories that blended hard-boiled crime fiction and “gee whiz” melodrama.

Wyatt’s take is a far cry from the slicker, more stylized art of the thirties and forties that we usually associate with the pulps  — his style is infinitely more “arty,” more traditionally “painterly.” Unlike most of his contemporaries, he worked primarily in oil on canvas, producing “real” paintings, achieving a bold, textured, and dynamic  imagery, and wasn’t afraid of heavy brushstrokes. The effect practically buzzed with a kind of moody energy that matched those early stories well — and arguably inspired later generations of illustrators. Wyeth would go on to illustrate all four of the Blackie stories published in The American Magazine.

Not that Wyeth, who had studied under Howard Pyle, was particularly known for his crime-oriented illustrations — much of his “pulp” work was more Western- and adventure-themed. Indeed, by 1914, Wyeth’s skills as an illustrator were already in demand, not just by those early magazine publishers, but by book publishers as well, most notably Charles Scribner’s Sons, who enlisted him for their Scribner Classics line of reprints aimed at younger readers. Among his most beloved and iconic works were illustrations for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer, Daniel DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling, and  Arthur Conan Doyle’s non-Holmes The White Company. Wyeth would go on to do posters, calendars, advertisements, and murals for both public and private clients. But he chafed under the boundaries imposed upon him by the commercial “illustrations” that paid the bills, but kept him away from his “paintings,” a distinction he was eager to make.

“An illustration must be made practical, not only in its dramatic statement, but it must be a thing that will adapt itself to the engravers’ and printers’ limitations. This fact alone kills that underlying inspiration to create thought. Instead of expressing that inner feeling, you express the outward thought… or imitation of that feeling…”

“Painting and illustration cannot be mixed—one cannot merge from one into the other,” he went on to explain.

Some contemporary critics viewed his work as too melodramatic or even juvenile, but Wyeth stood his ground, explaining that his illustrations were intended to be understood easily.

And Americans certainly “got it,” many of them having grown up with those much loved illustrated editions of the classics of their childhood.  Over his long career, Wyeth (a student of Howard Pyle, no slouch at illustration himself), would become one of the country’s most well-known and cherished  artists, responsible for more than 3,000 paintings and book illustrations.

And it apparently ran in the blood. His son, Andrew Wyeth and his grandson, Jamie Wyeth, both became acclaimed painters.