A Forgotten Tale by Arthur Conan Doyle!

Pardon the clickbait title, but I couldn’t resist after yesterday’s “news” that a “lost” Sherlock Holmes story “by” Arthur Conan Doyle had come to light. Fortunately, last night, Mattias Boström, a bona fide Doyle scholar, wrote an article which dismantled the hastily made claims. (Before being eclipsed by Howard Pyle, Doyle and Holmes were the objects of my obsession, and I still dip into their worlds from time to time.)

Now, about “A Forgotten Tale” by Arthur Conan Doyle...

It was a poem, not a tale per se, and it has no Sherlockian content. Evidently, Dr. Doyle (as he was often referred to, then) wrote it not long before he visited the United States for the first time, in 1894. In fact, the manuscript of “A Forgotten Tale” seems to have sailed from England just a few weeks - or even days - before the doctor himself did: Scribner’s Magazine accepted it on September 27, 1894, and Doyle arrived in New York on October 2nd. As the poem was scheduled to appear in the January 1895 issue (which would be on the newsstands by mid-December), Scribner’s must have commissioned Howard Pyle to illustrate it almost immediately.

I assume Edward L. Burlingame, editor of Scribner’s Magazine, communicated by letter or in person with Doyle about the poem - and possibly its illustrations. He may even have put Doyle in touch with Pyle, seeing as he had done just that with Rudyard Kipling regarding Pyle’s illustrations for “McAndrews’ Hymn” [sic] - soon to be printed in the December 1894 Scribner’s. Then again, Kipling had asked outright “if you could kindly place me in communication with your artist as it is possible that he might see his way to using some of my suggestions.” But Doyle may not have cared as much, or at all, about the pictures for “A Forgotten Tale”.

And, unfortunately, there’s no paper trail to answer that question. I hunted extensively through the Scribner Archives at Princeton and found nothing. Equally frustrating is that, when Doyle arrived, Pyle may very well have been in the midst of - or had recently finished - illustrating Doyle’s “The Parasite” for Harper’s Weekly, which was to appear in four installments (and in book form) while Doyle was in the United States! There, too, however, I have yet to find any correspondence between Doyle and Pyle or Harper & Brothers concerning the project.

What’s also maddening is that, during his travels, Doyle met “Howells, Cable, Eugene Field, Garland, Riley” - all of whom Pyle had met, and some of whom he knew very well - and was feted again and again by folks in Pyle’s social or professional circles. And, lo and behold, Doyle and Pyle were even in Philadelphia on the same day! Saturday, November 10, 1894, found Pyle lecturing at the Drexel Institute that afternoon and Doyle lecturing that evening - but, again, who knows if they encountered each other, or if Pyle attended the Doyle event?

And later, after Doyle spent Thanksgiving with Kipling in Vermont, he wrote to his mother, “Have you read his poem, McAndrews Hymn, in Scribner’s Xmas number. It’s grand!” But God forbid he should say anything about Pyle’s illustrations. Pyle, meanwhile, must have written down something about Doyle’s writings, but so far nothing has surfaced. I’ll keep looking.

My frustrations aside...

If Scribner’s Magazine accepted “A Forgotten Tale” on September 27, 1894, they probably didn’t get Pyle on board for upwards of a week or more. And as the printed magazine would need to be out in mid-December (and factoring in time before that to prepare photo-engraved plates of the illustrations), it’s safe to say that Pyle made his drawings sometime between mid-October and late November 1894 - all the while Doyle was travelling across the United States.

I have to admit that I’ve never been overly fond of Pyle’s “A Forgotten Tale” pictures. The first one feels too Daniel Vierge-like: but Pyle may have deliberately tried to inject some “Spanish” flavor into it, since the poem is set in Mediaeval Spain. And the second drawing is somewhat hampered by the backlighting. Then again, Pyle’s pen-work was in a sort of transitional phase, and he may have done these in a hurry: he was his usual busy self, writing and illustrating, and he had also just started teaching. His original pen-and-inks haven’t turned up, by the way, nor have his oil paintings for “The Parasite”. Somehow I’m not surprised.

Anyway, after two exhausting months, Doyle sailed off on December 8, 1894. I assume Scribner’s Magazine for January 1895 was still in production at the time, but surely Doyle saw a copy of the finished product (either the American or British edition) not long after he returned home.

Incidentally, Doyle’s departure date conflicted with the Authors’ Reception at the Juvenile Order of the Round Table in New York, to which he had been invited. And who was also invited and - reportedly - attended? Howard Pyle. Of course.

In the end, since Doyle didn’t return to the States until 1914 and since Pyle didn’t go to Europe until 1910-11 - and stayed almost entirely in Italy (where Doyle wasn’t) - they never met again, if they ever met in the first place.

However, the Sherlockian in me takes some solace in the fact that while a sickly Pyle was recuperating in a Rome hotel room in December 1910, his secretary noted how he “was soon absorbed in the Strand Magazine” - the Christmas issue of which featured “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” by Arthur Conan Doyle.

A FORGOTTEN TALE
by Arthur Conan Doyle

There still remains in one of the valleys of the Cantabrian mountains in northern Spain a small hill called “Colla de los Inglesos.” It marks the spot where three hundred bowmen of the Black Prince’s army were surrounded by several thousand Spanish cavalry, and after a long and gallant resistance, were entirely destroyed.


Say, what saw you on the hill,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“I saw my brindled heifer there,
A trail of bowmen, spent and bare
A little man on a roan mare
And a tattered flag before them.”

Say, what saw you in the vale,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“There I saw my lambing ewe,
And an army riding through,
Thick and brave the pennons flew
From the lance-heads o’er them.”

Say, what saw you on the hill,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“I saw beside the milking byre,
White with want and black with mire,
A little man with face afire
Marshalling his bowmen.”

Say, what saw you in the vale,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“There I saw my bullocks twain
And the hardy men of Spain
With bloody heel and slackened rein,
Closing on their foemen.”

Nay, but there is more to tell,
Garcia, the herdsman.
“More I might not bide to view,
I had other things to do,
Tending on the lambing ewe,
Down among the clover.”

Prithee tell me what you heard,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“Shouting from the mountain side,
Shouting until eventide,
But it dwindled and it died
Ere milking time was over.”

Ah, but saw you nothing more,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“Yes, I saw them lying there,
The little man and roan mare,
And in their ranks the bowmen bare
With their staves before them.”

And the hardy men of Spain,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“Hush, but we are Spanish too,
More I may not say to you,
May God’s benison, like dew,
Gently settle o’er them.”

“No American Writer Can Come Within Touch of You”

Howard Pyle’s fondness for the writings of William Dean Howells is well documented - mostly in Pyle’s own correspondence. On October 30, 1895, Pyle wrote yet another glowing letter to his literary idol, mentor, and friend:

My wife and I are reading your Shaker story together. I was so much impressed with the first number that I sat down immediately and wrote Harry Harper what I so strongly felt - that it only added to my already formed opinion that no American writer can come within touch of you. The measure of your success lies far beyond the radius of the present into the vaster cycle of the future....

The first number of your story was startlingly true to nature, the succeeding numbers are charmingly idyllic.

“Your Shaker story” was “The Day of Their Wedding” which appeared in seven weekly installments (or “numbers”) in Harper’s Bazar between October 5 and November 16, 1895. And “Harry Harper” was J. Henry Harper, a friend of both Howells and Pyle, and a member of the publishing firm.

Pyle had, in fact, expressed a similar sentiment in a letter of February 26 that same year: “I do not of course know what are your present rewards of popularity but I feel very sure that you are writing for future readers.” Over the past century, however, Howells’ stock hasn’t performed quite as well as Pyle thought it would.

But now, future readers, why not read the novel yourselves and put Pyle’s assessment to the test?

Howard Pyle’s Werewolf

“The Werewolf” by Howard Pyle in The Ladies’ Home Journal for March 1896

Werewolf? There wolf. (There - no, there, in the middle foreground of the picture - just squint a little and you’ll see it.)

Yes, who knew that Howard Pyle had painted one? But so he did, to illustrate “The Werewolf” by the Chicago poet and humorist Eugene Field, who perhaps is best remembered for “Wynken, Blynken and Nod” and “The Duel” (also known as “The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat”).

Pyle met Field at least once, at a dinner honoring Thomas Bailey Aldrich at The Aldine Club in New York on March 24, 1893, where the other guests included James Whitcomb Riley, Frank R. Stockton, Charles Dudley Warner, and William Dean Howells - all of whom had made significant contributions to the “juvenile literature” of the period. Whether they had met before or after or regularly corresponded, I don’t yet know, but on November 3, 1895, Pyle inscribed a copy of his newly-published novel, The Garden Behind the Moon, “To Eugene Field, My fellow worker in the world of Art” and added (in his confusingly hifalutin way):

For as the spoken word is like a breath of wind that maybe stirs the world around to agitation that soon is still again, so is the written word like a stone of rock cut out from the bosom of humanity, to endure for generations and for ages.

And as a pebble cast into the sea shall cause a movement to be felt in the uttermost parts of the waters for ever, so shall our work, cast into the bosom of futurity cause its motive to be felt to the furthermost ebb and flood of Eternity.

How great then, O! brother, our endeavour for good and for truth.

Inscription from Howard Pyle to Eugene Field, November 3, 1895 (via Bonhams)

But Field never read this: the day after Pyle inscribed the book, Field suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 45. Shocked, Pyle sent both the book and a letter “expressing his deep sympathies and fond memories” to the Field’s widow on November 10th. “That you appreciated his lofty aims[,] his nobility of thought[,] his humane efforts and the success that crowned them is shown in your words,” wrote Mrs. Field later that month, and she assured Pyle “of a lasting place in my thoughts for Gene’s sake” and called The Garden Behind the Moon “a story after my own heart.”

Then came “The Werewolf.” According to a syndicated news item, Field had been writing and rewriting the story since 1884:

His last revision pleased him and he decided to print it. But death came too suddenly, and the story was found, unpublished, among his effects. Mrs. Field, concluding to have the story appear, gave it to the editor of The Ladies Home Journal, in which magazine all of Mr. Field’s work, outside of his newspaper articles, was presented to the public.

And of course it needed to be illustrated. An article in the January 3, 1943, edition of The Sunday Morning Star of Wilmington, Delaware, quoted “a Wilmington man” who had been an associate editor of the The Ladies’ Home Journal and who recalled his 1895 visit to Pyle:

It is remembered that Mr. Pyle’s working quarters were crowded with costumes, guns and ships of the Revolutionary era. I was advised that Mr. Pyle was always busy, and it was a difficult assignment for the youthful editor of a magazine. However, the artist consented to make the picture after learning that it was to illustrate the last literary work of the Chicago poet and humorist. Mr. Pyle admitted that he was an admirer of Field, and inasmuch as the story suggested just the type of drawing that he had been anxious to make he accepted the commission and was authorized to write his own check.

The illustration was for “The Werewolf” and it was believed that it represented the best work of Mr. Pyle as well as the best story by the author of “Little Boy Blue,” and it was so regarded by admirers of both artistic and author. The illustration was lauded greatly, for Mr. Pyle had drawn the ghost of a snarling wolf, fitting the text admirably.

The fee is not known, but it included publication rights and “The Werewolf” painting itself. And Pyle must have painted it sometime between mid- or late November 1895 and January 1896, since by February it was on display in Chicago in a travelling exhibition of illustrations made for the Journal. In a review of the show, the Inter Ocean of Sunday, February 1, 1896, called Pyle’s painting “a weird, uncanny-looking thing, possessing strange fascination.” The next day, the same paper noted:

In this work Mr. Pyle experimented using red and black oils on canvas. The result is something weird and fascinating. In the foreground is the fabled monster, the “were-wolf,” a horrible creature dimly outlined; in the background is a party of pleasure-seekers, terror-stricken, fleeing for their lives. The scene is laid in a dark and dreary wood.

That same day, the Chicago Tribune said:

A striking picture in oil by Howard Pyle to illustrate “The Werewolf,” an unpublished tale by Eugene Field, is the strongest thing in the collection. Indeed, it is said Pyle himself regards it as the best work he has ever done.

It was admired by other attendees of the exhibit as well, including members of Field’s family. On February 27, 1896, his sister-in-law Henrietta Dexter Field wrote Pyle “to express the admiration and deep appreciation both my husband, Roswell Field, and myself have for the beautiful illustration you designed for ‘The Werewolf’”:

We saw the painting at “The Ladies Home Journal” exhibition of pictures here and were more than gratified that the public seemed to appreciate its beauties, as there were always crowds standing before it. If Eugene were here I feel sure that he would be more than pleased that you caught his idea so beautifully, and he doubtless would write you words of appreciation more suitable than these, whose only merit lies in the expression of the love of a sorrowing brother and sister.

The Chicago exhibition slightly pre-dated the publication of the picture in The Ladies’ Home Journal for March 1896, where - in a halftone plate engraved by Albert Munford Lindsay (who, I might add, attended some of Pyle’s illustration classes at the Drexel Institute and visited Pyle at his home at about this time) - it was wordily titled, “The werewolf skulked for a moment in the shadow of the yews, and Yseult plucked old Siegfried’s spear from her girdle.” Echoing the Inter Ocean, The New York Times of March 11, 1896, called it “a weird drawing...that is mystic and suggestive while thoroughly original.”

And, indeed, Pyle liked it enough to borrow it back from the publisher for his one-man shows at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia and the St. Botolph Club in Boston in 1897. The following year it was exhibited in Washington, D.C. - and perhaps elsewhere - again under the auspices of the The Ladies’ Home Journal. The Curtis Publishing Company (publisher of Journal) also issued it as a 12 x 15" print around the same time.

But then a fog rolls into the painting’s history: the anonymous associate editor quoted above also said, “It was long carefully displayed in the editor’s office” - and I assume, here, he was referring to editor-in-chief Edward W. Bok - “but [then it] mysteriously disappeared, and all attempts to relocate it have failed.”

Somehow, however, it wound up in the possession of Charles William Hargens, Jr. (1893-1997) and his wife Marjorie Allen (Garman) Hargens (1895-1978), illustrators both, who lived for many years in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. And then it went to their son, engineer Charles William Hargens III (1918-2013), and then to his estate.

And now it’s for sale: Freeman’s will auction the painting in Philadelphia on June 8, 2014. The estimate is $8,000-12,000. I consider that to be conservative, considering its size - 18 x 24 inches - and relative importance - but we’ll soon find out!

“The Werewolf” by Howard Pyle (via Freeman’s)

Howard Pyle Photographs His Family at the Beach

Delaware Today posted a photograph taken by Howard Pyle of his wife and children at Rehoboth Beach. They date it 1890, but it was more likely taken in 1894 or 1895. If you take a look at the image, you’ll see, from left to right:

Howard Pyle, Jr., born August 1, 1891
Theodore Pyle, born August 19, 1889
Phoebe Churchman Pyle, born December 28, 1886
Eleanor Pyle, born February 10, 1894
Anne Poole Pyle, August 1, 1858

Howard Pyle and the Groundhog

“According to the tradition of the ‘ground-hog’ the weather should have broken by now, but this time the ‘ground-hog’ was a prophet neither in his own country nor out of it. We read that you also on the other side of the ocean are suffering a like bitter winter and, indeed, the whole earth seems to be girdled by a belt of ice. I suppose that we should take comfort that one is not worse off than ones neighbours but I do not know that that fact makes the thermometer any higher.”

Howard Pyle to Thomas Francis Bayard (in London), February 10, 1895.

Howard Pyle’s Sphynx

Howard Pyle made the illustration shown here for William Dean Howells’ “Stops of Various Quills” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for December 1894; it appeared in the book of the same name, which Harper & Brothers published - and which Pyle illustrated in full - the following fall. On October 30, 1895, Pyle wrote to Howells:

I am very proud of our book, a half dozen copies of which Harpers have just sent me. I arranged with them to return the picture of the Sphynx. I remember you expressed yourself as liking it rather much, and so, I think, as you inspired the picture, it should be yours. Accordingly I shall have it framed tomorrow and send it on to you as some token of the pleasure I had in illustrating your poems.

Then on November 3, 1895, Pyle wrote again:

I sent you yesterday, by express, my picture of the Sphynx which I want you to keep for my sake.

It seemed to me that, in your poems, the piping Pan of your soul went up into just such twilight altitudes as I have tried to depict; and hearing the sudden dim rustle of wings, turned so to see his Sphynx crouching where she had not been before. 

I want you to have the picture for that reason too.

Howells later mentioned the painting in a July 9, 1903, letter to Pyle: “I have turned a barn into a library here” - in Kittery Point, Maine - “and I wish you could see how I have placed that rich gift of yours...”

I doubt Pyle ever saw it, though. And I’ve been trying to find a photo of the painting hanging on the wall there, but so far I’ve come up short. However, I did find a snippet from the Mark Twain Quarterly (or Journal) of 1936, which says of Howells:

He stood benignly before a painting by his friend, Howard Pyle, who had given him the original of a famous book-illustration. He was as proud as a child to have on his study wall a painting by this artist.

Howard Pyle’s Wedding Pictures

“The Sailor’s Wedding” by Howard Pyle (1895)

It’s Howard Pyle’s wedding anniversary today: on April 12, 1881, the 28-year-old artist-author married the 22-year-old Anne Poole, daughter of the J. Morton and Ann (Suplee) Poole, in a Quaker ceremony in the parlor of the Poole house at 207 Washington Street in Wilmington. Pyle’s close friend and fellow illustrator, Arthur B. Frost, was best man and his sister, Katharine, was one of the bridesmaids. Lunch followed and later that day the couple took the train to Washington and stayed just a few blocks from the Executive Mansion at the Arlington House, the finest hotel in the city at that time (and not to be confused with Custis-Lee Mansion across the Potomac River in Virginia).

Somehow, weddings don’t show up too often in Pyle’s pictures. The image above, “The Sailor’s Wedding,” comes from his story “By Land and Sea” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for December 1895. Wilmingtonians might recognize Old Swedes Church in the background - a place Pyle was fond of, historically and aesthetically, and where his brother Walter married his first wife in 1884.

Pyle’s own nuptials more likely resembled the scene he presented in “A Quaker Wedding” (Harper’s Bazar, December 12, 1885). It’s tempting to call it a self-portrait, but Pyle was probably already balding and his sister recalled that the chairs were arranged in rows, with an aisle leading to a bow window, where the couple stood under a large bell made of white flowers. Even so, the mood and the crowd must have been akin to this.

“A Quaker Wedding” by Howard Pyle (1885)

And, just for the sake of completeness, here’s another Pyle wedding picture, from Building the Nation by Charles Carleton Coffin (Harper & Brothers, 1882).

“A Kentucky Wedding” by Howard Pyle (1882)

I might add that on April 12, 1911, Howard and Anne Pyle celebrated their 30th - and last - anniversary together by taking a day-trip from Florence to Pisa with their two daughters. I wish I had some pictures.

A “Thanksgiving-Time Fancy” from Howard Pyle

“The Enemy at the Door” by Howard Pyle, from “Some Thanksgiving-Time Fancies” in Scribner’s Magazine for November 1895.

Howard Pyle vs. N. C. Wyeth

Behold, two great versions - two great visions - of the same scene from Kidnapped:

“I saw him pass his sword through the mate’s body” by Howard Pyle (1895)

“I saw him pass his sword through the mate’s body” by Howard Pyle, painted in black and white oil, about 11 x 16" on canvas board for The Novels and Tales of Robert Louis Stevenson: Kidnapped (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895). The original is at the Delaware Art Museum. The reproduction in the book (from which the above was scanned) is only 3 x 4.3" and the sized paper has rippled and yellowed over time.

“The Siege of the Round-House” by N. C. Wyeth (1913)

“The Siege of the Round-House” by N. C. Wyeth, painted in full-color oil on canvas, about 32 x 40" for Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913). The Brandywine River Museum has the original which is considerably less yellow than this plate (5 1/4 x 6 5/8") from an early edition of the book.

The more I look at Pyle’s paintings the more I feel that there is a certain “quietness” (I wouldn’t say “coolness”) in even his most action-packed scenes. They uncannily capture those slow-motion, hushed moments of highest tension. As I’ve said before (somewhere around here), one of the things I love about Pyle is that his best pictures - and his best writings - activate my other senses as I look or read: I feel the sun’s hot glare; I smell the grass or the smoke; I hear the distant birds or lapping waves. It’s subtle, yet it’s a big part of what gives his work its resonance and power. And when I look at this picture I hear the thin, almost imperceptible blade piercing the mate’s clothing as it emerges from his back.

Pyle once said something to the effect of, “If you hear a man say, ‘I will kill you!’ in wild passionate tones you will not believe that he means it - but if he should say it quietly and deliberately with the passion kept behind you will know that life is endangered.”

Of course, N. C. Wyeth rarely kept the passion behind. In this as in so many of his pictures (especially his earlier ones) his barbaric yawp is loud and clear - not to mention the cacophony of clattering swords, shouts, and stamping feet. His scene is more overtly melodramatic and theatrical than Pyle’s: it’s even illuminated as if by footlights. But while Wyeth’s actors are hammier, his colors brighter, and his composition simpler, somehow he pulls it off - as he so often did. His over-the-top approach was as effective as it was different from his teacher’s “quiet and deliberate” path.

November 8, 1895

Last year I wrote about how Howard Pyle altered his painting “The Burial of Braddock” after it was first published in magazine and book form in 1896 and before it was sent to its new (and present) owner, the Boston Public Library, in 1897. Now, here’s a little something written on this day 115 years ago about the origins of the same work...

And in case Woodrow Wilson’s handwriting is difficult to read, here is a transcription:

Everett House, Union Square, New York.

8 Nov., 1895

My dear Mr. Pyle,

Your last letter came just as I was leaving home, and I had to bring it off with me to find time for an answer.

You will notice that Washington in his account of Braddock’s death says “near the Great Meadows,” careful Mr. Parkman says exactly the same, writing before the publication of W’s account. It would not be safe, I think, to take the picture of Braddock’s grave as a picture of Great Meadows. [Colonel Thomas] Dunbar’s camp at the time of B’s death was, I should judge, between Gist’s and Great Meadows, nearer the latter than the former. See map opposite page 438 of Winsor’s “Mississippi Basin,” on which Gist’s is called “Guests.”

In haste,

Cordially Yours,

Woodrow Wilson

Mr. Howard Pyle

Wilson, by the way, was writing from Everett House, a hotel on the north side of Union Square, at the corner of Fourth Avenue (now Park Avenue South) and 17th Street, right next to The Century Company - a fragment of which can be seen on the left side of this photo of the hotel from the Museum of the City of New York. The hotel was pulled down in 1908, but The Century offices (which Pyle visited somewhat frequently in connection with his work for St. Nicholas and The Century Magazine, etc.) are now home to a Barnes and Noble store.

[Note of November 8, 2013: I added a few details and links since first posting this]

Howard Pyle Meets Woodrow Wilson, August 25, 1895

On this day 115 years ago, Howard Pyle traveled from Delaware to New Jersey and met Woodrow Wilson (for the very first time!) to discuss his illustrations for the professor’s serialized biography of George Washington. The next day Wilson wrote to Henry Mills Alden, editor of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine:

…Mr. Pyle came to Princeton yesterday. His train was late in arriving and so he had to hurry away, so that we had very little time together; but I think we came to a perfect and very satisfactory understanding about the illustrations.…

Like this lovely interior scene: “Even Sir William Berkeley, the redoubtable Cavalier Governor, saw he must yield” (published in the January 1896 Harper’s). You can see the original oil (15.25 x 23.5") at the Boston Public Library (that is, if they let you - I think an appointment is necessary) and you can see the unusual chair on the right at the Delaware Art Museum (sometimes, but maybe not all of the time). And you can see the boots on the gentleman in the foreground here, here, here, and here, among other places.

July 27, 1895

“Your spiritual writings haunt me like personal experiences.”

William Dean Howells to Howard Pyle, July 27, 1895

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Pyle

Robert Louis Stevenson died 115 years ago today, so here is Howard Pyle’s sole illustration for Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Even though quite a few of Pyle’s pictures are set in “modern” times (i.e. circa 1865-1911), they tend to be eclipsed by his historical and fantasy work. But this one has all the earmarks of his best and better-known pieces: a riveting, yet dynamic composition; fine detail (where needed) that gives way to looser, more evocative brushwork; great chiaroscuro, tension, drama; and it leaves plenty to the imagination while perfectly complementing the passage it illustrates:

He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a change - he seemed to swell - his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter - and the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arms raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.

“O God!” I screamed, and “O God!” again and again; for there before my eyes - pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death - there stood Henry Jekyll!

It reminds me (in a twisted way) of Vermeer’s “The Artist in His Studio” - the heavy drapery at one side, the framed picture (as opposed to a map) on the back wall, the placement and lighting of the cluttered table, the almost photographic “presence” (for want of a better expression) - though Pyle’s is more of a snapshot whereas Vermeer’s is a large format studio portrait.

It was published in Volume Seven of The Novels and Tales of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1895). The reproduction is a tiny 2.9 x 4.1" and the original oil on board is 11 x 15.6" and can be seen at the Delaware Art Museum.