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  • The Illustrator as Interpreter:N. C. Wyeth's Illustrations for the Adventure Novels of Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Susan R. Gannon (bio)

Castles, sailing ships, a pirate cave; tall, big-boned figures caught in mid-gesture; and all the swords, boots, swirling cloaks, and flintlock pistols a romantic could wish—dramatically lit and freely painted. The illustrations for Stevenson's adventure novels in Scribner's Illustrated Classics series are obviously N. C. Wyeth's. But though all Wyeth's pictures share a family resemblance, each sequence of illustrations also renders a markedly personal reading of a single novel and has its own mood, tone, palette, and recurrent images. Wyeth's pictures, like all good illustrations, create for each novel a rich and rhetorically powerful narrative sequence well able to modify a reader's experience in significant ways; for, if narrativity is "the process by which a perceiver actively constructs a story from the fictional data provided by any narrative medium," it is clear that the reader's own active narrativity is susceptible to the powerful impact of an illustrator's vision as he or she works on the cues provided in the discourse "to complete the process that will achieve a story" (Scholes 60).

Stevenson himself appreciated this, commenting approvingly of a set of illustrations that its "designer also has lain down and dreamed a dream, as literal, as quaint, and almost as apposite as . . . [the author's]; and text and picture make but the two sides of the same homespun but impassioned story" ("Bagster's Pilgrim's Progress" 296). And Stevenson's discussion of those illustrations goes on to trace the interactions between text and picture as they might be experienced by a perceptive reader. Following Stevenson's lead, I would like to examine some of the choices Wyeth made in illustrating Stevenson's novels—choices which can shape a reader's experience of a novel in significant ways—and then to offer a reading of the way Wyeth's illustrations for Treasure Island (arguably his best) work together in sequence to interpret that text. [End Page 90]

N. C. Wyeth illustrated four of Stevenson's adventure novels for Scribner's Illustrated Classics Series: Treasure Island (1911), Kidnapped (1913), The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1916), and David Balfour (1941). Wyeth's illustrations for each of these novels set up an immediate field of reference for the reader, enacting and embodying the story like a play or a film in specific visual terms. When the details of a verbal description are turned into visual images they become more precise and limited. A hat or coat must be cut a certain way; a human figure must be of a certain height and build; a house must have specific architectural features. Each choice which "places" details for the reader both limits and—paradoxically—offers a potential enrichment of the reading experience as the illustrator puts his own complex experience of the text at the reader's service.

One of the most important choices an illustrator can make is the selection of scenes to be shown. All of Wyeth's pictures accent thematic and structural development in the novels, but in the design of an illustrated book there are some illustrations which hold positions of special rhetorical force. In illustrating Stevenson's novels for the Illustrated Classics Series, Wyeth used cover, endpapers, and title page to make a strong thematic statement and set the tone for his whole interpretive reading of each novel. The cover of Kidnapped shows young David Balfour apparently stranded on the "island" of Earraid, unaware that he will be able to walk to freedom when the tide goes out. The cover of David Balfour, Stevenson's sequel to Kidnapped, dramatizes an important thematic difference between the novels. Highlighting the older David's inability to make any decisive moves for himself, it shows him bound hand and foot and carefully guarded, a real prisoner on a real island.

Wyeth also used endpapers to sum up the conflict in a book. In Treasure Island and in The Black Arrow, novels filled with violent contention for power and wealth, brutal pirates and members of an outlaw band stride purposefully...

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