Footnotes

Provenance
Purchased from an antique shop, Manchester, New Hampshire.

Literature
Frontispiece illustration, Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1939).
Douglas Allen and Douglas Allen, Jr., N.C. Wyeth, The Collected Paintings, Illustrations and Murals (New York: Crown Publishers, 1972), p. 207.
Christine B. Podmaniczky, N.C. Wyeth, A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings (London: Scala, 2008), I.1265, p. 571.
N.C. Wyeth Catalogue Raisonné, online edition, Brandywine Museum of Art, Research Number NCW: 1762, https://collections.brandywine.org/objects/9891/ramona-frontispiece-illustration-senora-gonzaga-moreno-and?ctx=4aee812b-8c93-4adf-acbc-9d3caf366742&idx=0.

N.B.
After a published cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post at age 20, NC Wyeth forged a successful career as an illustrator, working regularly for publishers of periodicals and novels. His work was renowned for its ability to increase the drama and character development of the accompanying text, something he achieved with vibrant, action-packed scenes, vivid colors, and a skillful use of light and shadow. For a 1939 edition of Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (originally published in 1884), Wyeth contributed four illustrations, only one other of which has been located. Jackson's novel tells the story of a half Scottish, half Native American orphan living in Southern California after the Mexican-American War. In this image, Wyeth deftly portrays the tension between Ramona and her rigid and overbearing foster mother, Señora Moreno. The frame on this painting seems to be of the artist's choice, the basic molding he used to protect the edges and corners of his illustrative paintings when sent by train from his Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, studio to publishers in Philadelphia or New York. Found by chance in a New Hampshire antique shop, this work likely was gifted by Little, Brown and Company publishers to an editor or to the estate of the author.