Mark Twain and Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood

Mark Twain and G. W. Cable via www.twainquotes.com

On February 13, 1884, author George Washington Cable - then in the midst of an extended stay at the Hartford, Connecticut, home of Samuel L. Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) - concluded a letter to his wife with this comment:

Mrs. Clemens is reading aloud to Mark & the children Howard Pyle’s beautiful new version of Robin Hood. Mark enjoys it hugely; they have come to the death of Robin & will soon be at the end.

The Clemens children were Susy, 11, Clara, 9, Jean, 3, and the “beautiful new version” was The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown, in Nottinghamshire, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons just a few months earlier. The first edition was bound in full leather, embossed with Pyle’s own designs.

Clemens’s fondness for the book endured: on New Year’s Day of 1903, he sent what was essentially a fan letter to Pyle, saying, “Long ago you made the best Robin Hood that was ever written.”

The particular copy from which Mrs. Clemens read that winter evening might still be around: a copy owned by Clara (which also contains a bit of marginalia in handwriting resembling that of Clemens: on page 145 the word “goodliness” is crossed out and changed to “godliness”), which was subsequently presented to the actress Elsie Leslie, now belongs to the University of Texas at Austin.

Katharine Pyle’s 150th Birthday

Four days after Abraham Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania - and about 100 miles east of there - Howard Pyle’s youngest sister Katharine was born.

The exact location of her birth hasn’t yet been confirmed, but it was either - and more likely - at 621 Market Street in Wilmington, Delaware (at the southwest corner of 7th and Market streets), or at “Evergreen” (or “Evergreens”), a farm on the Philadelphia Pike, about a mile north of town.

Like Howard, Katharine grew up to be an author and illustrator, and here and there they worked on a few projects together. The Wonder Clock, published in 1887, remains their most notable collaboration, but an even earlier joint effort can be found in the pages of The Continent. The July 4, 1883, issue of this short-lived magazine featured John Sartain’s article on “Wood-Engraving as an Occupation for Women” - which in turn featured an engraving by Katharine Pyle “from a drawing by Howard Pyle.”

At that time, nineteen-year-old Katharine was indeed studying wood-engraving at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women in anticipation of turning it into a career. But, fortunately for her, she soon abandoned this handicraft (which was effectively killed off by halftone printing by the turn of the century) and, fortunately for us, she turned her attention again to writing and drawing.

Hot Air at Howard Pyle’s Studio

From the Sunday Morning Star of Wilmington, Delaware, November 4, 1883:

“Why am I so blue?”

“All eyes were turned to Abraham Davenport...” by Howard Pyle

It’s always interesting - interesting to me, at least - to see great minds succumb to rounds of anxiety and self-doubt. On July 17, 1883, Howard Pyle wrote to his wife, Anne, who was down at her family’s cottage in Rehoboth, Delaware with their 13-month-old son, Sellers:

I sit here this evening a right up and down blue man. Why am I so blue? That I can’t tell thee; thee knows how I get such spells upon me; one of them is upon me now. I have had a day of enforced - I might almost say - idleness through the failure of Harpers to send the Higginson MS. that they must forward. Beside this, my drawing for Butler (the Philadelphia publisher) has not turned out what I could have desired. It is too good to do over again and yet is almost too bad to send away. I want to get it out of the house for I hate the sight of it when I come into the studio. I don’t know whether it is the hot weather or whether it is thy being away that upsets me, or whether I am going backward in my work, but certainly it seems to me that I do not draw so well now as I did three months ago. I really am very much inclined to write to Mr. [Charles] Parsons [head of Harper & Brothers’ art department] and ask him to send me away somewhere on a trip so that I can get away from the jog-trot drudgery of manufacturing pictures for two or three weeks. If I have a change, perhaps I can tackle my work again with more vim and go when I come back to it again.

Pyle may well have been in a sort of post-partum depression at this point: he had recently finished writing and illustrating his Gesamtkunstwerk, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood - which would come out that fall - and he seems to have been casting about for something equally absorbing. He had just begun writing verses which would later be collected in Pepper & Salt and was doing - or trying to do - his usual bread-and-butter work.

The “Higginson MS.” was Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s manuscript for either “The Dawning of Independence” or “The Birth of a Nation” or “Our Country’s Cradle” - articles which Pyle ultimately illustrated for Harper’s Monthly.

And his “drawing for Butler” is, perhaps, the illustration shown here for Monroe's New Fifth Reader (Philadelphia: E. H. Butler & Co., 1884), which somehow missed inclusion in the 1921 bibliography of Pyle’s works (I’m not yet entirely sure if this is the one Pyle meant, though: I need to keep hunting).

Pyle’s Franklin Street studio, meanwhile, was in the process of being built, hence his statement, “I want to get it out of the house,” since between 1881 and 1883 his workspace was located in his - actually, his mother-in-law’s - home at 207 Washington Street in Wilmington.

Still blue, Pyle wrote to Anne the following day: “Bad luck today. No MS. from Harpers.… Rubbed off from my picture that which I did yesterday, and think it looks better. I shall send it away tomorrow without touching it any more - I hope.”

“...and followed by Washington’s Birthday”

“Enter Fourth of July bowing and followed by Washington’s Birthday” by Howard Pyle from “The Revolt of the Holidays” by E. I. Stevenson (Harper’s Young People, December 18, 1883).

A Victim to Science, 1883

“A Victim to Science” by Howard Pyle (Harper’s Young People, November 20, 1883)

At the Quill and Grill Club, November 8, 1883

Howard Pyle belonged to many clubs and associations over the years: some well-known - like the Grolier, the Players, and the Century - and a few more obscure. For example, Pyle was a founding member of the Quill and Grill Club, formed on August 17, 1883, in Wilmington, Delaware. It was composed mostly of journalists and lawyers, including some of Pyle’s intimates, such as Alfred Leighton Howe (to whom Pyle dedicated Within the Capes), Lewis C. Vandegrift (dedicatee of The Rose of Paradise and later Pyle’s neighbor), and newspaperman Edward Noble Vallandigham (Pyle’s “esteemed friend of many years standing”).

Interestingly, another early member of the Quill and Grill was the legal scholar and future World Court Judge, John Bassett Moore, then in his early twenties. At an 1885 meeting of the club - held in Pyle’s studio - Moore read poem which was published in his Collected Papers (and once upon a time at the Library of Congress I managed to dig up and hold in my hand the original manuscript). That same year, Moore went to Washington to work under Secretary of State Thomas Francis Bayard (later Pyle’s friend and landlord).

Pyle created the invitation shown here in 1883 or, perhaps, 1884, judging from the style of the lettering and decorations.

At a meeting held on November 8, 1883, attorney Joseph A. Richardson read a poem (dedicated to Miss Elizabeth Shipley Bringhurst, later Mrs. John Galt Smith) entitled “The Evolution and Development of Q. and G.,” in which the club’s founders are humorously described, including this stanza on Howard Pyle:

One by nature has been gifted
With the power of creating
Shapes of most surpassing beauty
From musty tomes of ancient legend.
At his touch sprang into being
Sweet Elaine, Shalott’s fair lady,
Robin Hood, and all his fellows.
His cunning hand that raises
Forms of brave Colonial heroes
Damsels prim in olden costumes,
Cavaliers and burly Roundheads
Till they seem to breathe before us.

Trips off the tongue, no? But we should be grateful to have a relic such as this, which sheds light on how a young Howard Pyle was perceived by his friends.

August 5, 1883

“On Saturday I resumed work upon the illustrated verse. It progresses much more slowly than I had hoped. The printing of the letters of the text takes a long time and I had several setbacks through mistakes.”

So said Howard Pyle in a letter to his wife, Anne (then at her family's “cottage” in Rehoboth, Delaware), on Sunday, August 5, 1883. The “illustrated verse” to which he refers was, I assume, “Ye Romantic Adventures of Three Tailors,” the first in a series ultimately collected in the book Pepper and Salt in 1885. (The “mistakes” didn’t include reversed apostrophes, apparently.)

The idea for the series had come to Pyle a few weeks before: on July 8 he told Anne:

I wrote a verse for Harper’s Young People which I propose making into a full page. If Harpers should take to it, as I hope they will, I propose writing a number of similar bits (say fifty) and turning them into a child’s gift book next Christmas a year, first publishing them in Young People.

He updated her on August 3:

This morning I started drawing that series of full-page pictures with verses that I hope to do for Young People, to be published ultimately in book form. I told you yesterday how I hammered away at the verses and only hit one late in the afternoon. I hope that they may be successful: I did hard conscientious work today but got only a very little done.... This afternoon I had a sort of discouraged fit, for the work I was doing seemed so puerile and childish but I feel differently now, for after all no work conscientiously done is “childish”...

As Pyle had already started the illustration, he was probably “hammering away” at subsequent verses (for “Two Opinions,” say, or “A Victim to Science,” the next to be published). “Ye Romantic Adventures of Three Tailors” appeared in Harper’s Young People for August 28, 1883, which actually came out about a week earlier, say August 21 or 22, so only about two weeks would have been allowed for production: photo-engraving the plate, printing, stitch-binding the covers, packing, and shipping the magazine. An awfully tight, but entirely possible schedule for Harper and Brothers, which had its own printing plant and bindery on the premises at Franklin Square.

Howard Pyle’s Santa Claus, 1883

We don’t usually associate Howard Pyle with Santa Claus, but Harper’s Young People for December 18, 1883, features Pyle’s only known published images of the jolly old elf. These illustrated “Revolt of the Holidays” by Edward Irenæus Stevenson. Granted, Pyle’s Santa Claus is not as fully realized as the one imagined by his friend Thomas Nast, or by his student N. C. Wyeth, but beggars can’t be choosers. The Delaware Art Museum owns the original pen and ink drawings.

Howard Pyle in Black and White, 1883

Although it’s always bittersweet when an original Howard Pyle comes up for sale (due to my pathological desire to possess anything he created coupled with my financial inability to do so), at least I get to see an often long-lost work in person, or, short of that, I get to see a high-resolution scan or photograph. The Men of Iron piece is a case in point as Heritage Auctions posted great shots of it (and five others) on their site when part of Charles Martignette’s collection was sold last July.

And here’s a link to another example that Christie’s auctioned in September. It is “Shays’s Mob in Possession of a Court-House,” painted by Howard Pyle (probably in the summer or early fall of 1883) for Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s “The Birth of a Nation” in Harper’s Monthly for January 1884.

Until it came on the market, this 8.5 x 14" oil on canvas had only been seen (except, I assume, by the owners’ inner circles) reduced to 4.8 x 6.4" and as the wood-engraver Arthur Hayman had re-interpreted it. But now we can inspect it pretty closely and see it as it looked when it left Pyle’s studio 126 years ago.

Thanksgiving Day (Entering Politely)

A seldom seen illustration by Howard Pyle for E. I. Stevenson’s “Revolt of the Holidays” in Harper’s Young People for December 18, 1883. The reproduction in the magazine (from which I made this scan) measures 2.8 x 4.1 inches. The original ink drawing is 4.5 x 7 inches and belongs to the Delaware Art Museum.

Evacuation Day, November 25, 1783

In honor of the now-neglected Evacuation Day, which celebrated the departure of British troops from New York after the Revolutionary War, here is “The Last Boat-Load of the British Leaving New York” by Howard Pyle, an illustration for Henry P. Johnson’s article “Evacuation of New York By the British, 1783” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for November 1883. The engraver has yet to be identified, but the dimensions of the cut are 4.7 x 5.2 inches.