N.C. Wyeth (1882‱945), “Dying Winter, 1934, oil on canvas, 42¼ by 46 3/8 inches unframed; 47 3/8 by 51 3/8 inches framed, Brandywine River Museum purchase.

The New Britain Museum of American Art will feature the illustrations and fine art paintings of American artists in the exhibition “Double Lives: American Painters as Illustrators, 1850‱950” December 12⁆ebruary 22.

The exhibition will feature more than 50 works of art on loan from museums, galleries and private lenders such as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Delaware Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art.

This exhibition explores the often uneasy relationship between the art of easel painting and the art of illustration. It focuses on artists who were an important part of the history of the narrative tradition in American culture and who practiced both easel painting and illustration in the years between 1850 and 1950.

Easel painting and illustration, in the mid-Nineteenth Century, were part of an overall narrative tradition in American art where both were intertwined and sometimes interchangeable. This exhibition not only compares and contrasts fine art painting and illustration, but charts their development in America over time through the eyes of a select group of artists who engaged in both.

William Glackens (1870‱938), “Washington Square Winter,†1910, oil on canvas, 25 by 30 inches, New Britain Museum of American Art, Charles F. Smith Fund.

Illustration itself has many functions, but the exhibition emphasizes illustrated books, magazine articles and stories, nonfiction and fiction, directed at an audience of adults, as well as children and young people.

While illustrations are based on a given text, to illuminate that text, fine art is created according to the artists’ own creativity and inspiration.

Boyle explains that “in looking at the differences and similarities between the art of illustration and the art of independent easel painting and in comparing both by the same artists, perhaps it might be said that illustration stands in relation to fine art as prose does to poetry. Color, shape and draftsmanship, the abstract qualities of design, are the tools of both the fine arts painter and the illustrator, just as words are the tools of both the writer of prose and the writer of poetry.”

The museum is at 56 Lexington Street. For information, www.nbmaa.org or 860-229-0257.