Howard Pyle on Saint-Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial

This past July 18th was the 150th anniversary of the Second Battle of Fort Wagner. In 1883, Augustus Saint-Gaudens was commissioned to create a sculpture honoring the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry - commanded by Robert Gould Shaw - which suffered heavy losses in the battle.

Some fourteen years later, on May 31, 1897, the sculpture was unveiled on Boston Common. About four months after that, Howard Pyle, returning from a visit to Boston, sent a note to Saint-Gaudens in which he said:

Will it interest you to have one so much out of the world as I tell you how great is your Shaw Monument?

It impresses me now as the greatest and the most distinctly American achievement and I can forsee to reason to alter my opinion in the future.

(On Pyle‘s letter, by the way,which is now at Dartmouth College, Saint-Gaudens wrote, “I value this highly” - confirming yet again that Pyle’s opinion was indeed important to him.)

And in subsequent years, Pyle the teacher repeatedly referred to the sculpture to illustrate a point. During his September 5, 1904, composition lecture, for example, he said:

One can take an unpicturesque fact and, by emphasis, make a picturesque fact of it.

...for instance, take something I have often cited - the Shaw Memorial by St. Gaudens.

St. Gaudens had the problem before him of a row of marching soldiers with their guns all on a level.

Most artists would have broken the line of the guns by making some higher than others trying to get variety, but St. Gaudens, defying all rules - frankly put them straight across the composition. And so by insisting upon an apparently ugly fact he strengthened his work.

National Public Radio recently ran a story on the memorial in case you’d like to hear more.

“Malvern Hill” by Howard Pyle (1896)

Raising the First National Flag, January 1, 1776

“Raising the First American Flag, January 1, 1776” by C. O. DeLand

No, this isn’t a long-lost Howard Pyle: it’s by Clyde Osmer DeLand, who painted it under Pyle’s supervision at the Drexel Institute in the fall of 1897. As Pyle explained in a January 1898 description of his School of Illustration:

...I hold a “Composition Class” every week, some of the compositions submitted being of an excellence sufficient to admit their being used in pictorial form - page and double-page cuts - by the more important illustrated periodicals....

To cultivate independence, the compositions made by the pupils are from time to time submitted to some leading illustrated periodical or newspaper, and if accepted are worked up into a picture with only verbal criticism upon my part.

Such was the case with one of DeLand’s drawings which, after meeting with Pyle’s approval, was submitted to and approved by Harper’s Weekly. DeLand then got an official order for the picture and started painting.

Although it’s not a very well-known aspect of his mentoring, Pyle encouraged his students to write as well as illustrate, just as he had done with great success. Some, but not many, followed his advice, including DeLand who supplied his own text for “Raising the First American Flag, January 1, 1776” in the January 1, 1898, issue of Harper’s Weekly. In fact, it’s possible that DeLand (who turned 25 when the magazine was on the newsstands) was the first Pyle student to have his own illustrated text published. Here’s what he wrote:

THE FIRST NATIONAL FLAG
by Clyde O. Deland

Prospect Hill (known also as Mount Pisgah) was the strongest fortification of the American army during the siege of Boston, and it was here that the Union flag was unfurled for the first time January 1, 1776, the day on which the new Continental army was organized.

Upon that day copies of the King’s speech at the opening of Parliament had been sent from Boston by General Howe to Washington. The speech was one better fitted to arouse opposition than submission to the English throne. It stated that the British nation was too spirited and powerful to give up those colonies which had been protected for so many years with “much expense of blood and treasure”; that both its army and navy had been strengthened, and that negotiations for foreign aid were already entered into. The English authorities entertained great hopes of the salutary effects of this message from the throne to the rebellious Americans. Accordingly the hoisting of the Union flag and the discharge of thirteen guns that saluted it were hailed with great delight by the British officers, who supposed it to be a token of submission to the crown.

Referring to these circumstances, Washington, in a letter to Joseph Reed, dated January 4, 1776, said: “The speech I send you. A volume of them were sent out by the Boston gentry, and, farcical enough, we gave great joy to them without knowing or intending it. For on that day - the day which gave being to our new army, but before the proclamation came to hand - we had hoisted the Union flag, in compliment to the united colonies. But, behold! it was received in Boston as a token of the deep impression the speech made upon us, and as a signal of submission. So we hear by a person out of Boston last night. By this time, I presume, they begin to think it strange that we have not made a formal surrender of our lines.”

The Annual Register of 1776 gives a more detailed description of the flag. It says, “So great was the rage and indignation [of the Americans] that they burned the speech and changed their colors from a plain red ground, which they had hitherto used, to a flag with thirteen stripes, as a symbol of the number and the union of the colonies.”

Previous to this, so-called “Union flags” were sometimes displayed, but were merely British standards with the legend “Liberty and Property,” or “Liberty and Union,” set upon the field as emblems of colonial rights and principles.

In 1855 the historian Benson J. Lossing discovered a contemporary colored drawing that for the first time rendered an authentic presentment of the flag. It was a sketch of the Royal Savage (Arnold’s flag vessel on Lake Champlain in the battle of October, 1776). An ensign was depicted flying at the mast-head. This flag displayed the British union - the combined crosses of St. George and St. Andrew - in the usual upper corner, but the field had been changed from the solid red into alternate stripes of red and white. It was doubtless the union jack in the corner of the flag hoisted at Cambridge that caused the English to misinterpret it - to suppose that the Americans intended to submit once more to the rule of George the Third.

The colonial Union flag of thirteen stripes was also displayed in Pennsylvania during the year. A letter describing the departure of the American fleet under Admiral Hopkins from Philadelphia, in February, says it sailed “amidst the acclamations of thousands assembled on the joyful occasion, under display of a Union flag, with thirteen stripes in the field, emblematical of the thirteen united colonies.”

After allegiance to the British crown had been thrown off, the jack bearing the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew became inappropriate, and on the 14th of June, 1777, the Continental Congress passed the following resolution:

Resolved, That the flag of the United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white, on a blue field, representing a new constellation.

The illustration represents the ceremony of raising the new colonial flag. The scene depicts the interior of the fortifications on Prospect Hill, looking southeast across the Charles River toward Bartons Point in Boston.

The colonial troops, while much better organized than ever before, were still without a regular uniform, the occasional buckskin hunting dress of the Southern riflemen or of the frontiersmen being in picturesque contrast to the bucolic homespun of the New England minute-men.

Washington’s uniform is described in a letter written July 20, 1775, thus: “His dress is a blue coat with buff-colored facings, a rich epaulette on each shoulder, buff underdress, and an elegant small sword; a black cockade in his hat.”

Three of the cannon used at this time are now planted upon Cambridge’s common. They date from the reign of George the Second.

The profile of Boston, it may be said, has been rendered as carefully as possible from contemporary drawings and prints of the period. Edes & Gills North American for 1770 contains an engraving by Paul Revere, entitled “Landing of the Troops in Boston, 1768,” which gives an approximate view of that city, with its beacon, towers, and spires. Besides this, Lieutenant Williams of the Royal Welsh Fusileers, while stationed in Boston under General Gage, made a panoramic view in colors of the country surrounding the city. A copy of this drawing is in the cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The vessel in the middle distance represents one of the British war-ships guarding the approaches to the city.

Note: for some reason, when I first posted this I titled DeLand’s picture “Raising the First National Flag, January 1, 1776” but the correct title should be “Raising the First American Flag, January 1, 1776”.

Young Folks’ Favorite Authors

This is one of four playing cards featuring Howard Pyle in The Fireside Game Company’s Young Folks’ Favorite Authors, which was manufactured and sold by The United States Playing Card Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, starting in 1897.

Young Folks’ Favorite Authors was one of many “author” card games, but the first to include Pyle. An advertisement in The American Stationer for November 11, 1897, said:

The Fireside Game Company’s

NEW, ENAMELED,

Educational Games.

This new line of enameled card games is the finest ever issued.

Handsomely put up in bright-colored boxes, printed in bronzes or stamped with gold leaf.

These games are educational and instructive as well as entertaining, and afford endless amusement for young and old, at the same time unconsciously imparting much valuable information.

Young Folks’ Favorite Authors - the ad also said - featured “Portraits of writers dear to our young people. Such favorites as Pansy, Louisa M. Alcott, Oliver Optic, Eugene Field, etc. The game is played by the conventional Author's rules.”

And, speaking of the rules, here they are...

“Delaware, the land of peaches!”

“A Farm ‘Pluck’” by Howard Pyle (1878)

“There are few more beautiful sights than a peach orchard in full bearing, the vistas between the parallel rows of trees over-arched with dark green foliage, the verdant roof studded with ripe and ripening fruit, suggesting the gems of Aladdin’s cavern. Every where throughout the orchard are seen the figures of the ‘plucks,’ mounted on high step-ladders, drawing down the heavily laden branches of luscious fruit. Every where the air is burdened with the all-prevading [sic] fragrance of peaches.”

Howard Pyle on “The Peach Crop in Delaware” (Harper’s Weekly, September 14, 1878)

Howard Pyle enjoyed peaches, and he went to great lengths to ensure that his friends would enjoy them, too. A little over 114 years ago, during the height of Delaware’s peach season, he wrote this letter to Christopher L. Ward:

Rehoboth, Del., Aug. 9th., 1897.

Dear Chris:

I am sending to Carrie by tomorrow (Tuesday) morning’s train a basket of specially picked peaches, gathered as nearly perfectly ripe as possible, so that you will have to get them without loss of time and spread them out so they may keep. They will not, I think, last more than twenty-four hours, but some of them may not be so perfectly ripe as that. I shall try to send them in care of the Baggage Master so that there will be no delay in your getting them. If I cannot do that, they will have to go by Adam’s Express, in which case you must get them from the express office as soon as may be. I think you had better have some one meet the morning train.

You still linger with us in odds and ends of conversation and in continual recollection, for your visit was a great pleasure to us.

Very truly yours

Howard Pyle

“Carrie” was Caroline Tatnall Bush Ward, Pyle’s onetime neighbor and model, who married “Chris” on May 5, 1897. As Pyle said in the same 1878 article quoted above:

The Delaware peaches are not an exotic growth, like the grapes of the same name, but a strictly local production, excelled by no other fruit of the kind in the world. The quantity of peaches raised in the peninsula is still constantly on the increase, as facilities for transportation and the increase of canning establishments open ever wider markets for their sale. The latest statistics number the peach-trees of the peninsula at about five millions, covering fifty thousand acres of the best and most productive land, and representing in money an invested capital of nearly three million dollars.

Of the fresh fruit shipped to the markets of New York, Philadelphia, and other cities of the Middle States, there passed over the Delaware Railroad, in 1877, 4248 car-loads - over two million baskets - while at least an equal quantity would find its way to market by water. This year's crop is much less in quantity, probably not more than half an average crop, owing to the untimely frosts of late spring - a fact that has probably already unpleasantly impressed itself upon peach-lovers by the comparative scarcity this season of this most delicious and satisfying fruit.

Life Lessons from Howard Pyle

From “The Divinity of Labor,” a commencement address delivered by Howard Pyle to the graduates of Delaware College on June 16, 1897:

When you have chosen your profession and have entered fairly into the work of your life, that which is first necessary to achieve success is application.

By application is not meant mere dumb and stubborn laboriousness of duty; by application is meant the perfect conjunction or application of your mind to the subject in hand. If you are a farmer, do not pause at the end of the furrough to speculate upon the destiny of mankind; if you are a student, do not, whilst your eyes are marching across the page, allow your brain to occupy itself with other things; if you are an experimenter or an inventor, do not pause in the midst of your labors to formulate some new experiment or some other invention aside from that upon which you are at work; if you are an author, or an artist, do not permit your mind to ramble through the shady depths and the breezy stretches whilst your canvas or your paper lies empty before you. Bend every faculty of your mind on the work which lies beneath your hand. Concentration is a habit - it is not a gift, and I do assure you as a man who has known many men and who has observed many men at their work - I do assure you that just in the degree that a man concentrates his mind upon the work that lies immediately before him, in exactly that degree does he achieve success in the labor of his life.

As necessary, however, as is the concentration of the mind, it is not more necessary to success than it is to develop the opportunities that lie immediately at hand.

There are few temptations greater than the temptation that possesses a man to gaze into some impossible to-morrow, beholding in it an opportunity that does not exist to-day.

The opportunities that lie immediately at hand appear to be very small and very petty; and those that are remote appear to be very great and very pregnant of possibilities. Alas! how many men are there who, gazing into that seductive future, stumble over the things of the present and so fall prostrate in the dust!

He who succeeds, is he who seizes the opportunity that lies within his grasp and developes that opportunity to its uttermost. No one can ever achieve a great success unless he performs well the small things of life. To achieve success, everything, however insignificant, should be done to the fulness of your powers.

Lurid Pyle

This doesn’t look 113 years old, but it’s from Howard Pyle’s “A True History of the Devil at New Hope” in Harper’s Weekly for December 18, 1897. It served as a headpiece for the chapter titled “How the Devil was cast out of the Meeting-House” and the reproduction measures 6 x 3.3". A wonderful thing: flat, bright, bold, and creepy.

More on John Henderson Betts

Last year I posted something about John Henderson Betts, who studied with Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institute and at Chadd’s Ford, but who met an untimely and gruesome end shortly before his 25th birthday. Since then, a few of his paintings have come to light...

Betts conveniently dated this one November 9 (or 4), 1897, and he most likely made it in Pyle’s Life Class Studying from the Draped and Costumed Model (a.k.a. “Draped Model Class” or “Class in Draped Model” and so on) since it contains no “setting” per se. As Pyle said in the Drexel course catalogue:

In this class, departing essentially from the ordinary work of academic schools in studying from the living figure, the model is costumed and posed in some suggestive action, and the student is instructed to draw the figure that it may be introduced into a picture.

Or, as he put it another (yet, perhaps still convoluted) way:

The purpose here is to instruct the student in the necessary technical methods to be used in representing the draped human figure. The processes required to properly draw the draped figure are so different from those demanded in the rendition of other kinds of academic work that it has been found necessary to require proficiency in this before advancing the student to the final branch of instruction.

Although Pyle did not pick Betts’ study for the second annual School of Illustration show in the spring of 1898, another student, Cornelia Greenough, exhibited “The Cavalier, 1650,” which may have come from the same pose. (Betts' “Colonial Figure, 1740” was shown, however, as well as his “Peace and War,” “Study of a Head - Emperor,” and “The Highwayman.”)

And now here’s something representative of “the final branch of instruction” - i.e. the Illustration Class:

 

Although this one is not titled, I would call it “The Priest and the Piper.” Why? Because two other Pyle students, Sarah S. Stilwell and Bertha Corson Day, exhibited pictures of that name in the May 1899 student show at Drexel and Pyle (who I’m sure wrote the text of the catalogue) said:

The subject was painted as class work with the purpose of having one of the pictures used in Harper’s Weekly [sic] Hallowe’-en number. Of all the class work, the best two examples were chosen. The above two were submitted to Harper’s Weekly, and the drawing by Miss Stilwell was selected as being the most available for publication.

Now, compare Betts’ with Stilwell’s picture, which was published in Harper's Bazar (not Harper's Weekly) for November 5, 1898. There it’s called “A Vision on All-Hallows Eve” and it illustrates a playlet by Pyle himself, titled “The Priest and the Piper: A Halloween Fantasy”...

“A Vision on All-Hallows Eve” by Sarah S. Stilwell (1898)

And while we’re on the topic, the Brandywine River Museum has a painting by Caroline Louise Gussmann, which may have been born out of the same knock-kneed piper pose. (In fact, there may well be a score of similar images out there - and the same goes for Betts’ cavalier picture.)

“Tipsy Piper” by Caroline Louise Gussmann

This next and last one is dated November 1898, which may have been after Betts left Drexel. But the Pyle influence is still very much in evidence - and since one of Betts’ compositions was exhibited in the May 1899 show, perhaps he studied with Pyle for a while after the summer session of 1898. This looks less like a class piece than a bona fide illustration, though I have yet to identify if, when, or where it was published.

And in case you’re inclined to learn more about these or see several other works by Betts, please look here.

Would that I could snag them myself!

“In the Prison”

Would you like to own Howard Pyle’s “In the Prison” from Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker by S. Weir Mitchell? Now’s your chance.

The original 18 x 25" oil in “part color” is coming up for auction at Freeman’s in Philadelphia on June 19, 2011. It might need a good cleaning, unless Pyle’s pigments have irreversibly darkened over the last 114 years.

This is how it looked when it was first published in The Century Magazine for May 1897. The 5.2 x 7.3" plate (in halftone, but heavily worked over by a human engraver) is a much different animal:

The Battle of “The Battle of Bunker Hill”

On November 18, 1897, Howard Pyle wrote to Joseph Hawley Chapin, Art Editor of Scribner’s Magazine:

…I send you today the Bunker Hill picture. It is quite carefully studied, and I think, excepting the portraiture which of course has to be idealized, it is a correct view of the battle.…

The ship of war firing in the distance is the Lively. In the remoter distance I have represented Copp’s Hill with the boat yard at the foot of the hill as nearly as I could represent it from the maps of the period. The smoke arising from the remoter distance is being discharged from a fortification upon Copp’s Hill. Charlestown lies back of the hill and the black smoke arising is from the burning houses.…

It’s worth noting that this description formed the basis of the caption for “The Battle of Bunker Hill” when it was printed in Scribner’s Magazine for February 1898, illustrating the second installment of Henry Cabot Lodge’s The Story of the Revolution:

The scene represents the second attack and is taken from the right wing of the Fifty-second Regiment, with a company of grenadiers in the foreground. The left wing of the regiment, under command of the major, has halted, and is firing a volley; the right wing is just marching past to take its position for firing. The ship-of-war firing from the middle distance is the Lively; in the remoter distance is the smoke from the battery on Copp’s Hill. The black smoke to the right is from the burning houses of Charlestown.

According to some notes taken during a 1949 conversation between Frank Schoonover and Gertrude Brincklé:

When Mr. Pyle was collecting information and ideas for this painting he wrote to the Admiralty office in London for details about the real formation in the battle, but got very little information. He made the composition from what they told him, and from his own imagination. At first the drummers were marching on the right side, and then he put them in the rear where they are now.

The version seen here was also Pyle’s second try: he was unhappy after a week’s work on the first, so he slashed the canvas with a sword. And then he painted this one in four days.

Charles Scribner’s Sons was impressed enough with Pyle’s “Battle of Bunker Hill” and “Fight on Lexington Common” to consider reproducing them - and the other ten pictures he was contracted to do - in color and selling them by subscription. This never panned out. But the publisher did decide to send an exhibition of illustrations for The Story of the Revolution around the country while the history was being serialized - a canny promotional stunt.

Pyle balked. He told Joe Chapin on December 30, 1897, that “to exhibit my pictures in their present partially finished state would, in my opinion, be injurious to them and to me, and that I am accordingly compelled to lay aside my other work and to retouch them whether I choose to do so or not.” However, he conceded - under protest - in the same letter.

But Pyle wasn’t being entirely frank, and a few days later he confided to Charles Scribner II: “It may not be a probability, but at least it is a very strong possibility that this set of pictures, when completed, may be purchased by the Congressional Library Committee, to be hung in the Library Building in Washington.” Pyle was worried, though, that key government officials would see his “unfinished” works on display and deem them unworthy of so high-profile a home as the Library of Congress. He was also concerned that showing “The Battle of Bunker Hill” as is in Boston might jeopardize his chances for a commission to paint a mural on the same topic for the Massachusetts State House. He explained, “The picture was sent to you very hastily and in an unfinished state, because of the demand of the Magazine to have it in the Art Department by a certain given date. I was aware that it was crude in its effect and unfinished in all of its details - but had no idea that it was so crude in color as it proved to be when I saw it again and with fresh eyes.”

In the end, Pyle indeed tweaked “The Battle of Bunker Hill” somewhat: compare, for example, the clouds in the magazine plate (in black and white, above) and the original (in color, below). Ultimately, however, for all his hand-wringing and the efforts of his friends with influence, both the Washington and Boston schemes collapsed.

The Return from Deerfield

“The Return from Deerfield” by Howard Pyle, 1897

The town of Deerfield, Massachusetts, came up in conversation recently and it prompted me to exhume this picture from my files. Howard Pyle painted “The Return from Deerfield” for Volume I of A Half-Century of Conflict, included in France and England in North America, Part Sixth, which formed Volume XI of the The Works of Francis Parkman (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1897).

The original 14 x 24" oil (in part color) belongs to the University of Delaware. And here is a blurry photo of the same (swiped from UD’s website, with apologies) if only to give some idea of Pyle’s use of red in the cap, robe, kerchief, etc. and the “colder” overall feel of the piece, which is lost in the warm browns and yellows of the photogravure.

The calm demeanor of the standing figure always puzzled me: I guess because I was misreading the title as “The Return to Deerfield.” But in finally bothering to read the chapter Pyle illustrated, I now understand that it shows the French and Native American forces marching back to Canada after raiding the village and taking a number of villagers captive. The detail of the standing figure’s collar indicates that he is the cold-blooded Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville, who commanded the attack in the winter of 1704. The woman at his snowshoed feet is Eunice, wife of the Reverend John Williams. As Parkman says:

The prisoners were the property of those who had taken them. Williams had two masters; one of the three who had seized him having been shot in the attack on the house of Stebbins. His principal owner was a surly fellow who would not let him speak to the other prisoners; but as he was presently chosen to guard the rear, the minister was left in the hands of his other master, who allowed him to walk beside his wife and help her on the way. Having borne a child a few weeks before, she was in no condition for such a march, and felt that her hour was near. Williams speaks of her in the strongest terms of affection. She made no complaint, and accepted her fate with resignation. “We discoursed,” he says, “of the happiness of those who had God for a father and friend, as also that it was our reasonable duty quietly to submit to His will.” Her thoughts were for her remaining children, whom she commended to her husband’s care. Their intercourse was short. The Indian who had gone to the rear of the train soon returned, separated them, ordered Williams to the front, “and so made me take a last farewell of my dear wife, the desire of my eyes and companion in many mercies and afflictions.” They came soon after to Green River, a stream then about knee-deep, and so swift that the water had not frozen. After wading it with difficulty, they climbed a snow-covered hill beyond. The minister, with strength almost spent, was permitted to rest a few moments at the top; and as the other prisoners passed by in turn, he questioned each for news of his wife. He was not left long in suspense. She had fallen from weakness in fording the stream, but gained her feet again, and, drenched in the icy current, struggled to the farther bank, when the savage who owned her, finding that she could not climb the hill, killed her with one stroke of his hatchet. Her body was left on the snow till a few of her townsmen, who had followed the trail, found it a day or two after, carried it back to Deerfield, and buried it in the churchyard.

November 12, 1899

In the court of the [Drexel] Institute were displayed last week four historical paintings by Howard Pyle, of which “Jefferson Framing the Constitution” was one. They are all painted in the low tones Mr. Pyle invariably employs, and they are finished with the same conscientious thoroughness. Mr. Pyle is almost the only artist living who can finish a picture to the last detail and yet lose nothing of its artistic value. (The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 12, 1899)

Shown here is the engraving of the work as it appeared in Scribner’s Magazine for March 1898. So much for the “low tones.” But you can see what it should look like via the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies. The original painting (about 24 x 36") is at the Delaware Art Museum.

The Philadelphia Inquirer wasn’t quite right about the title, especially since Jefferson didn’t frame the Constitution. It’s rightfully called “Thomas Jefferson Writing the Declaration of Independence” and illustrated “The Story of the Revolution” by Henry Cabot Lodge.

In order to capture the effect of candlelight - and still see what he was doing - Pyle placed his model in a tent set up in his studio. He most likely painted this in late November 1897.

“St. Valentine’s Day” by Howard Pyle

In his advanced Illustration Class at the Drexel Institute, Howard Pyle occasionally assigned seasonal topics to his pupils with the aim of submitting the best examples to art editors of leading periodicals. Pyle sometimes provided text to go along with or perhaps to inspire his students’ illustrations, and so we have his observations on “Decoration Day” (illustrated by Sophie B. Steel), a Halloween playlet called “The Priest and the Piper” (with a picture by Sarah S. Stilwell), and, apropos of today, “St. Valentine’s Day,” printed in Harper’s Weekly for February 19, 1898, and featuring a double-page spread by Anne Abercrombie Mhoon.

I need to dig up more on Miss Mhoon, who studied with Pyle for about five years and who Pyle must have considered one of his stronger pupils: in spring 1897 she and Bertha Corson Day spent two weeks working in his Wilmington studio; her work was shown in several exhibitions of the Pyle-directed School of Illustration; Pyle featured two of her pictures in his article, “A Small School of Art” (Harper’s Weekly, July 17, 1897); and in 1898 she was one of ten students awarded a scholarship to the first Summer School of Illustration at Chadd’s Ford. If what I’ve learned is accurate, Mhoon was born June 6, 1876, in Mississippi, and died January 2, 1962. She married Hugh McDowell Neely (1874-1925) in Philadelphia in 1906 and had at least one child, named Hugh (1907-1937). All three are buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee.

“St. Valentine’s Day in New England” by Anne Abercrombie Mhoon (1897)

ST. VALENTINE’S DAY
by Howard Pyle

St. Valentine’s Day in the old times possessed a popular significance that we of these degenerate days of filigree paper and printed rhymes can hardly appreciate. Popular tradition had it that the birds mated upon the good bishop’s natal day, apropos of which Old Drayton, in Shakespeare’s time, writing a verse to his “Valentine,” begins his pastoral thus:

“Muse, bid the morn awake;
Sad winter now declines;
Each bird doth choose a mate;
This day's St. Valentine’s” -

and so forth, to his mistress’s eyes, lips, and other charms.

Following these supposed habits of the feathered creatures, it became by-and-by a custom in the generation or so following for the men and women of that day to choose each his or her Valentine, to whom he or she was supposed to remain mated for the rest of the year. The gentleman generally entered into the compact with a poetic effusion and a gift, of more or less value, to the lady of his choice, and for the twelvemonth following he was supposed to devote himself exclusively to his chosen mate.

Usually the element of accident entered not a little into the choosing of the Valentine, for the first man and the first woman who met in the morning were supposed to remain Valentines and mated for the year to follow.

As witness to this, Gay, writing early in the eighteenth century, and beginning with the same theme that inspired Old Drayton -

“Last Valentine, the day when birds of kind
Their paramours, with mutual chirpings, find” -

says,

“The first I spied - and the first swain we see
In spite of Fortune shall or true love be.”

Old Pepys in his immortal Diary - that great reservoir of dead and bygone gossip - gives us a number of glimpses into the Valentine’s day of his time.

Once, mounting to the Olympian altitude of the gossip of White Hall, he tells us, apropos of Miss Stuart (afterward Duchess of Richmond), that “The Duke of York being her Valentine, did give her a jewel of about £800; and my Lord Mandeville, her Valentine this year, a ring of about £300.” Descending thence to the platitudes of his own private affairs, the good gentleman tells us very soberly that “I am also this year my wife’s Valentine, and it will cost me £5”; and adds, naïvely, “but that I must have laid out if we had not been Valentines.”

In another entry in his Journal he tells us how his wife hid her eyes lest she should see the masons working about the house, and so should miss choosing her proper Valentine; and in another place he informs us that “My wife, hearing Mr. Moore’s voice in my dressing-chamber, got herself ready, and came down and challenged him for her Valentine.”

From all of which we of these days may catch a certain remote notion of the importance of St. Valentine’s day in those far-distant old times so long passed away and gone.


As illustrating the importance of this one-time notable feast-day, Miss Mhoon has given a pictured image of the transplantation of the custom of the time into Puritan New England of, say, the year 1655.

We know what strong testimony the Puritans bore against the puddings and the “meat pies” (probably the mince pie of our day), and all the jocularities of the old Christmas season, and we also know that they made a point of studiously ignoring the anniversary of the King’s birthday. It is altogether likely they would look with even less favor upon the suggestive levities of Valentine’s day.

The somewhat seedy Cavalier, who is doubtless offering the Puritan maiden an effusion in these, in which dove is made to rhyme with love, and eyes with skies, and dart with heart, has perhaps been spending the whole long winter in the dull, cold little settlement for the sake of escaping, let us say, from the pressure of his debts at home. One can imagine how greatly a man of his parts must have wasted in such surroundings as the picture indicates. As for the Puritan maiden, either her heart inclines more kindly toward the young Presbyterian minister who, clad in black, and with a voluminous theological volume under his arm, regards the pleasantries of the stranger with such manifest mislikings - either this, or else she has been so well brought up that even a cavalier in a red cloak and with high London manners cannot melt her reserve. Who shall say? The ways of women are passing strange!

I confess to a sympathy for the poor Cavalier fellow, and wish that a good tight ship may be landing with sassafras-wood at some near-by port, and that he may thence get a safe passage back to England again, and into more congenial surroundings.