A Special Gallery Tour of N.C. Wyeth: Poems of American Patriotism

Join museum curators and educators for a more focused look at some of the museum’s key summer exhibitions. This tour departs from the Wyeth Center lobby.

In 1922, famed American illustrator Newell Convers (N.C.) Wyeth was commissioned to illustrate a new edition of Brander Matthews’ Poems of American Patriotism, a compilation of poems by various American authors first published in 1882. Matthews’ book was what he described as a “history of America as told by her poets,” containing “a collection of old Favorites.” These “old favorites” included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “Grandmother’s Story of Bunker Hill Battle,” Francis Scott Key’s “Star Spangled Banner,” Julia Ward Howe’s “ Battle Hymn of the Republic,” John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Barbara Frietchie,” and Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!.”

Among its other well-known authors were Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Cullen Bryant, Bret Harte, Rudyard Kipling and Edith Wharton. This exhibition includes the surviving sixteen of seventeen Wyeth paintings (one was destroyed in a fire), generously lent by The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.

Lead Exhibition Sponsors: Linda Bean’s Maine Wyeth Gallery and Sasha and Ed Bass 
Exhibition support: Anna Mae Twigg in memory of George Twigg III, and the Gilder Foundation
Midcoast Community Partners: O’Hara Corporation, Strout & Payson, P.A.
Primary Media Sponsor: Maine Home + Design