About this work
The eye enters *Lumber* the way it enters a clearing — suddenly, and with a sense of physical weight. Pairs of lumberjacks can be seen throughout the composition, working in tandem to fell trees as the oncoming winter presses in around them. Wyeth fills the canvas with the drama of hard labor set against a rugged, forested landscape — broad-shouldered figures straining against timber and cold air, rendered in his characteristic earthy palette of deep greens, grays, and the raw amber of fresh-cut wood. The horizontal format (the original oil on art board measures 21 by 31 inches ) gives the scene an expansive, almost cinematic sweep, with the men dwarfed but not diminished by the ancient trees surrounding them. This is physical America — muscular, elemental, and proud.
*Lumber* was commissioned by the Coca-Cola Company in 1943 as part of a series of posters celebrating American industry. The series, titled *Our America*, was an explicitly patriotic undertaking during World War II — a visual argument for the vitality and self-sufficiency of the American workforce at home. The work was catalogued in Frederick Houk Law's *Our America, Lumber: Lumber, Trees* (1943) and later included in Douglas Allen and Douglas Allen Jr.'s *N.C. Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations and Murals* (1972).
Wyeth was commissioned by The Coca-Cola Company to execute illustrations including a series on the lumber and transportation industries for the "Our America" educational campaign. It is one of his final major commissioned works — he died in October 1945 — and it distills everything that made his imagery endure: the heroic workingman, the breathing American landscape, and a storyteller's instinct for the gesture that carries a whole world in it.
*Lumber* belongs in rooms that can hold a little grandeur — a study, a library, or a wide hallway where it can be seen at a distance and approached slowly. It suits collectors drawn to American Regionalism, the history of illustration, or the New Deal–era celebration of labor and the land. The palette — all winter light, dark forest, and warm flesh tones — reads quietly from across a room but rewards the closer look Wyeth always repays. It speaks to anyone who finds beauty not in the decorative, but in the decisive.
