The Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine will open a fascinating exhibition of works by artist N.C. Wyeth Saturday, June 16.  Entitled “N.C. Wyeth: Poems of American Patriotism,” this show features 16 works by the artist created to illustrate an anthology of some of this country’s best known poems. The exhibition, generously lent by The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, will be on view in the museum’s Wyeth Center through Oct. 28.

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.

For more information please visit www.farnsworthmuseum.org.