Howard Pyle Filled Out His Son’s Birth Record

Howard Pyle’s third child, Theodore Pyle, was born 125 years ago today. His birth record (via Familysearch.org) was filled out by Pyle himself:

George Washington’s First Inauguration

“The Inauguration” by Howard Pyle, engraved by F. S. King

Today marks the 224th anniversary of George Washington’s first inauguration as president of the United States. The ceremony was held April 30, 1789, on the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street in the city of New York - then the new nation’s capitol.

Howard Pyle pictured this great event at least twice. He painted his first version, evidently, in the summer of 1888, not long after finishing his children’s book Otto of the Silver Hand. The black and white oil painting (about 23.5 x 16 inches) was then engraved on wood by Francis Scott King (1850-1913) and appeared in John Bach McMaster’s article “Washington’s Inauguration” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for April 1889.

At the same time the magazine was on the newsstands, Pyle’s painting was exhibited at the Centennial Celebration of the Inauguration of George Washington as First President of the United States at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, from April 17 to May 8, 1889. Eventually, it wound up in the hands of collector William F. Gable, then it was auctioned by Freeman’s in Philadelphia in 1932, and ultimately it wound up at The Mint Museum, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

“The Inauguration” by Howard Pyle, via The Mint Museum

About a dozen years later, Pyle revisited the scene, ostensibly for Woodrow Wilson’s “Colonies and Nations,” then being serialized - and accompanied by 21 Pyle pictures - in Harper’s Monthly Magazine. In a March 28, 1901, letter to Wilson, Pyle suggested it as an illustration and explained: “I have already made an illustration for it for McMaster’s article, but I think I could represent the street in front of the old State House, a crowd of people and Washington on the balcony.”

Wilson approved of the idea and Pyle likely painted it sometime in April or May. For some unknown reason, however, it wasn’t reproduced in the magazine; rather, it appeared in the expanded, book version of Wilson’s articles, titled A History of the American People, published by Harper and Brothers in October 1902. Pyle’s black and white oil (23.5 x 15.5 inches) now belongs to the Delaware Art Museum.

“Inauguration of Washington at New York” by Howard Pyle

Pyle’s Post-Publication Changes, Part 2

Howard Pyle was not above reworking a picture after publication. “The Burial of Braddock” is one example: after it appeared in Harper’s Monthly - and after Paul Leicester Ford pointed out an error in it - Pyle turned a fancy, but historically innaccurate coffin into a crude box made of scrap wood. He did this right before shipping it to its new home at the Boston Public Library where it would, in his words, “go upon record.”

Another post-publication change can be seen in his 1889 work, "My hatred of him seemed suddenly to have taken to itself wings," for Harold Frederic’s novel In the Valley. Here’s how it looked in Scribner's Magazine for July 1890, engraved by Henry W. Peckwell:

"My hatred of him seemed suddenly to have taken to itself wings" (magazine version)

Now compare it to the halftone plate that was used in the book edition of the novel. (Granted, this is really just to show how the original picture differs from engraver Peckwell’s interpretation.)

"My hatred of him seemed suddenly to have taken to itself wings" (book version)

Fast-forward to 1892: Frank Nelson Doubleday - then a rising star at Charles Scribner’s Sons, but who hadn’t yet struck out on his own - was collecting material for a high-end, oversized “book” in portfolio form called American Illustrators. In early April, Doubleday wrote to Pyle about the project and asked him to choose one of his illustrations to be featured among the 15 finely-printed plates. Without hesitation, Pyle picked "My hatred of him seemed suddenly to have taken to itself wings" since it was “perhaps, my best work for Scribners in black and white.” Doubleday then tracked the original to Germany (I’m not sure why it was there) and had it shipped to Pyle.

But on July 16, 1892, just after receiving the picture, Pyle asked Doubleday, “if you would be willing for me to alter the drawing a little. I find, looking at it with new eyes, that the canoe is somewhat out of proportion and just a little out of drawing and I should like to make it as perfect as possible.” Doubleday acquiesced and Pyle had at it. The result can be seen here, in the photogravure plate as published in American Illustrators that October:

“The Wounded Enemy” (American Illustrators version)

Not only did Pyle reconstruct the ends of the canoe, he fiddled with the tall trees in front of the moon, softened the waterline, and toned down the reflections in the water. All of it to good, almost Dewing-esque effect. The title, too, was changed to the much less wordy “The Wounded Enemy.”

I don’t know if the original painting ever made its way back to Germany, but Scribner’s loaned it to the Trans-Mississippi and International Exhibition in Omaha, Nebraska in 1898, and in May 1913 they sold it for $150 (double, incidentally, what they had paid Pyle for it 24 or 25 years earlier) to collector William Bradhurst Osgood Field (1870-1949), and now it belongs to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. And exactly two years ago today, Joyce K. Schiller’s short essay on the picture was posted here.

Remember the Johnstown Flood?

In 1866, 13-year-old Howard Pyle, then visiting Washington, D.C., wrote to his father, “Please tell me in thy letter wether I can stay [in] Baltimore and if I can ask mother what number streat uncle Davis Hoops lives.”

Davis Haines Hoopes (1803-1873) was married to Pyle’s mother’s sister, Mary West Painter (1808-1885), who lived with the Pyle family in Wilmington for several years before her death.

And on this date in 1889, Davis and Mary’s grandson (thus Pyle’s first cousin once removed), Walter Ernest Hoopes (who was then Secretary of the Johnson Steel Street Rail Company), as well as Walter’s wife, Maria, and their two sons, Ernest and Allen, were “swept away and perished” in the Johnstown Flood.

Their deaths resulted in a curious legal proceeding detailed here and elsewhere.

“Morgan at Porto Bello” (and then New York)

Above is the earliest known letter written on this date by Howard Pyle. It is addressed to Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833-1908), the “Banker-Poet” and one of the first seven men elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

For a couple of years, Pyle carried on a spirited correspondence with Stedman, who had been fortunate enough to have a few of his ballads embellished by Pyle. After seeing Pyle’s illustration for his poem, “Morgan,” (published in Harper’s Monthly for December 1888) Stedman wrote on July 20, 1888:

The drawing, or rather painting, is magnificent! Figures, faces, composition, all dramatically fine, and catching the spirit of the ballad at its most characteristic point. ’Tis a pity that this unique painting, which is the result of both talent and close labor, should have to be condensed into a page of Harper. Yet, it will be effective, even on that scale.

Yes, it is one of your very best, and will bear off the honors next December.

I suppose you own the painting, but I ought to. I wish I were able to pay your price for it, if you would permit it to go on my walls. When I see such a picture enriching my own verse, I feel more than ever the loss of my former means. Still, I will pinch a good deal in other directions, if you will name a price for it.

Pyle named $100. Stedman replied:

I am charmed that you are willing to sell me the “Morgan” cartoon, and at a price which I dare pay, and to obtain which (the amount) I shall write and sell a hundred dollar poem, between now and the date of its return to your possession. And if I had the means formerly at my command, I should tell you that you ought to have more for so successful and elaborate a picture. If then, you are willing to dispose of it to me, for the hundred dollars, please consider it sold. And when you deliver it, advise me as to the most appropriate frame for me to give it.

By late October 1888, the painting hadn’t yet made its way back to Pyle, who worried that Frank H. Wellington (who, incidentally, died after eating toadstools in Passaic, NJ, in 1911) may have “soiled” it while making the wood engraving for the magazine, and he begged Stedman to “let me slick my child up a little before he is finally presented to Metropolitan Society”:

Seriously, I have always felt a little bit shabby - a trifle hang-dog concerning that charge of a hundred dollars for a drawing which should unquestionably have belonged to you. So I would like to do all that I can to make it presentable and acceptable.

But Stedman told Pyle to “do that you choose, & I’ll be proportionately grateful.”

It took a while, but by January 28, 1889, Pyle had finished cleaning, repairing, retouching, re-varnishing, and framing the painting, and “Morgan” was on “his last cruise, perhaps,” to New York. Pyle also mentioned to Stedman that he was about to take a cruise of his own to the West Indies, “to follow in the footsteps of the redoubtable Welshman [i.e. Henry Morgan] and others of his kidney”:

Oh, that you were inspired to go along! What an opportunity to become acquainted with you as we cruised together through the Spanish Main and amongst those musty old towns that were one time the glory as they were the ruin of poor Mother Spain. My wife goes along with me.

Stedman jokingly warned Pyle of the “beautiful girls, of mixed breed & dubious character” in Panama, who “wear jasmines in their hair…& talk Spanish-Indian - but you are to take your family with you? If so, you are safe. However, the French invaders have probably taken all the poetry out of the place.”

And - to make a long-winded story short - Pyle replied on February 3, 1889:

Wilmington, Delaware

Feby. 3rd 1889

My Dear Mr Stedman: -

I am glad that your Morgan came at last - the hanging which he received was too good a fate for the like of him.

As for the frame - I may as well be frank at once - it was the making of it that delayed his final voyage to New York. To tell the truth I have always had a sneaking fondness for that particular offspring of mine, and it tickled a certain rib of self vanity to dress him in good clothes before I packed him off to his new home in great New York. Moreover I have always had an idea that black and white would look well set in a wooden mat. I hope you like the plan of so framing it and will pardon me if I have taken a liberty in putting a stick or two around the drawing instead of leaving it to your better taste.

I shall certainly endeavour to make the Panama trip that you advise - it sounds alluring enough. But as for the girls with jessamines in their hair, why, as I take my good wife with me and as in these seven years I have n’t found anyone that quite tickles my fancy as she does I hardly think that I shall leave the tiller and jump overboard at the beck of the “greaser” sirens.

I remembered your book-plate very well so soon as I laid eyes on it. It was published in the “Book-Buyer”, was it not? Honestly I like it much better than my own lucubrations, if I may so apply the word, it looks more like a real book-plate and less like a Christmas card.

I suppose that the Players will officially notify me if I am to be enrolled as one of them [They did so on February 11, 1889]. As for the book-plate, if they pass favorably upon it I hope that they will return it for corrections as soon as possible as I leave home on Saturday next.

Very Truly Yours

Howard Pyle

I might add that I’ve been able to bask in the glory of the original and I’ve sometimes wished that Pyle had followed Stedman’s advice and had made “a painting four times this size, from this fine study, possibly with more colors than black-and-white, for a large effect and for exhibition and sale.”

But he didn’t. And “Morgan at Porto Bello” - a relatively small, black and white thing at 15 x 24 inches - now resides in rural New Jersey.

“Morgan at Porto Bello” by Howard Pyle (1888)

November 5, 1889

A teeny, tiny (1.5 x 4.6"), untitled vignette from “Wisdom’s Wages and Folly’s Pay” by Howard Pyle. It debuted in the November 5, 1889, issue of Harper’s Young People and was later included in Twilight Land. It illustrates this passage:

When the cook saw what Babo had done he snatched up the rolling-pin, and made at him to pound his head to a jelly. But Babo jumped out of the window, and away he scampered, with the cook at his heels.

I scanned the piece at 300 dpi to make it easier to inspect the deft handiwork.

“In the Reading-Room” at Sotheby’s

“In the Reading-Room” by Howard Pyle will be auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York City on Wednesday, September 29, 2010. It comes from the massive James S. Copley Library, which has been sold in parts over the past few months. The subject must have appealed to Copley, a newspaper man, who may have acquired it in the 1960s from Helen L. Card, successor to E. Walter Latendorf, who had it in 1950.

This 20 x 14" black and white oil on canvasboard was one of 26 illustrations Pyle made (probably in late 1889) for John Austin Stevens’s “Old New York Taverns” in Harper’s Monthly for May 1890. He was paid $800.00 for the lot: $100.00 each for four full-page oil paintings and $400.00 for 22 pen-and-ink drawings. Another one of the oils - “Game of Bowls” - sold at Christie’s in 2008 for $25,000 (including Buyer’s Premium).

As do a number of Pyle’s pictures from the late 1880s, this one features a sort of microcephalic gentleman with large feet. Not sure why Pyle fell into this trend, but I’m on the case.

You can zoom in and really study Pyle’s confident brushwork here.

“The Parting of My Little Boy”

No tragedy in Howard Pyle’s life could ever compare with the death of his son Sellers. The surrounding circumstances only made it more sad. He briefly outlined what happened in a letter I quoted, but here is some more...

Pyle’s journey to the West Indies was his first trip out of the country (with the probable exception of some Canadian jaunts in 1877). Jamaica was only supposed to be one stop on Pyle’s two-month-long itinerary: he also planned to visit Panama, the Bahamas, and other locales associated with his “Buccaneer heroes” in order to gather material for a couple of Harper’s Monthly articles and for a novel which he hoped would be his magnum opus. His wife, Anne, about nine weeks pregnant with their third child, would accompany him. Their two children would stay in Wilmington: Phoebe, 2, at home with Anne’s mother, and Sellers, 6, with his aunt (and Howard’s sister) Katharine Pyle, at the house she shared with her father at 802 Franklin Street.

Howard and Anne sailed from New York on February 9, 1889, on the Atlas Line steamship Ailsa. The voyage to Kingston took about a week and Pyle recorded his first impressions of their arrival in “Jamaica, New and Old” (Harper's Monthly, January 1890):

It was all like a dream, for there are times when the real and the unreal interweave so closely that it is hard to unravel the one from the other. Mostly gratification is the unfortunate part of anticipation; it is such a gross and tasteless fruit to be the outcrop of so pretty a flower; but that vision of the south coast of Jamaica, so long looked forward to, was at once so full of the lovely changes of afternoon and evening and moonlit night, and so full of suggestions of the romantic glamour of the past and by-gone life, that the bright threads of fancy and the duller strands of fact interwove themselves into such a motley woof that it was hard indeed to separate the one from the other.

It was almost yesterday that shivered under a heavy overcoat, with a bleak sky above and a sea of ice below; to-day floated upon the rise and fall of the great ground-swell of a tropic sea, flashing into spray under a humming trade-wind that set the feathery cocoa-palms and the ragged banana leaves upon the distant shore to tossing and swaying. Flying-fish shot like silver sparks, with a flash and gleam from the water to the right and the left, skimmed arrow-like across the heaving valleys of the waves, and disappeared far away with another flash and gleam.

Although Pyle’s article goes on to refer to Anne, it gives no hint of the awful way their plans changed.

Sellers Pyle died on the morning of February 22 and a telegram must have been sent to Jamaica almost immediately. In his Pyle biography, Henry Pitz wrote, “There was a desperate time of trying to find transportation back home and a wait of many days for a steamer sailing. They reached home long after the funeral.”

But I think Pitz was misinformed: Every Evening of February 23 stated, “The body of the boy was placed in a vault in the Wilmington and Brandywine cemetery to await the arrival of the bereaved parents,” and according to the “Marine Intelligence” of the New York Times, on February 25 the steamship Dorian - with the Pyles aboard - sailed from Morant Bay and arrived in New York on the evening of March 4. The Pyles may have spent the night in quarantine on the boat, but surely they arrived home by the following day, which also happened to be Howard’s 36th birthday.

Surprisingly, after only a week in Wilmington, Pyle returned alone to Jamaica to finish his work. He confined his travels and resultant two-part article solely to the island, however, and he never wrote a novel specific to the area.

Pyle’s leaving home so soon may seem cold-hearted, but his Swedenborgian faith had helped him find solace in a “firm and unfailing belief in a future life” - as well as in writing and drawing and painting.

“I have tried not to let my troubles interfere with my life’s work and ways and think I may say that I have pretty well succeeded,” he explained to Edmund Clarence Stedman. He added, “There are many sad things in this world but few that are unhappy excepting what we make for ourselves.”

And as time wore on, Pyle became more and more convinced that “the bitter delight of a keen and poignant agony” which Sellers’ death represented was necessary to make his own life complete: he saw it as “an agony that has dissolved much - almost all of the poison flesh leaving only a thin membrane to hide from the eyes the brighter light of a life beyond.” As he put it to W. D. Howells (after the publication of The Garden Behind the Moon, which he dedicated to Sellers), “Death is so thin a crust of circumstance that I can feel his heart beat just on the other side.”

February 22, 1889

“In the midst of a most charming trip my wife and I received a cablegram telling us that our little boy - a noble little fellow of six years old had died of membranous croup after only a few hours of sickness. He was our only son and, apart from parental prejudice, was I may say a child of deep mind and noble generosity of character.”

Howard Pyle to Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, April 13, 1889

January 11, 1890

The January 11, 1890, issue of the New York Ledger included a “Souvenir Supplement” featuring “The Captain’s Well,” a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, illustrated by Howard Pyle. Here is one of the illustrations (which Pyle painted in late summer or fall 1889), untitled, and engraved on wood by Henry Wolf.

Note the marked resemblance to Pyle’s much better known “Marooned” of 1887...

...and his even better known “Marooned” of 1909...

Like many artists, Pyle revisited similar themes, scenes, and poses now and then, and he made at least four variations on this one (the third, chronologically speaking, is in a private collection).

The figure here, however, is neither marooned, nor a pirate. Rather, he is Valentine Bagley (1773-1839), a Massachusetts sailor, who was shipwrecked off the Arabian coast in 1792.

“He wandered for fifty-one days over the desert, suffering intensely from lack of food and water, and from heat, having been robbed by Bedouins of all his clothing,” said William Sloane Kennedy in “In Whittier’s Land” (The New England Magazine, November 1892). And here is an extract from Whittier’s poem, specific to the picture.

In the Arab desert, where shade is none,
The waterless land of sand and sun,

Under the pitiless, brazen sky
My burning throat as the sand was dry;

My crazed brain listened in fever dreams
For plash of buckets and ripple of streams;

And opening my eyes to the blinding glare,
And my lips to the breath of the blistering air,

Tortured alike by the heavens and earth,
I cursed, like Job, the day of my birth.

Then something tender, and sad, and mild
As a mother's voice to her wandering child,

Rebuked my frenzy; and bowing my head,
I prayed as I never before had prayed:

Pity me, God! for I die of thirst;
Take me out of this land accurst;

And if ever I reach my home again,
Where earth has springs, and the sky has rain,

I will dig a well for the passers-by,
And none shall suffer from thirst as I.