Detachment Disorder

Howard Pyle’s bookplate on the marbled pastedown endpaper of…what, exactly?

We may never know, because someone - a monster - conveniently detached the cover from the rest of the book. (Please don’t follow this example: it’s like cutting the signature off a letter then throwing the letter away.) I suspect, though, that it came from a uniform set of one of Pyle’s favorite authors - Jane Austen? Eugene Field? Robert Louis Stevenson? - as there are at least two other detached, half-morocco, marbled boards just like this one.

When Pyle made his own bookplate is, as yet, hazy. On January 9, 1902, he wrote: “I would be very glad to send you a bookplate if I had one but, upon the same principle that a shoemaker’s children go barefoot, my not invaluable library has, for all these years, gone without such accompanying decoration.”

For years Pyle had pasted a small paper label, featuring only his name engraved in script, into his books, but sometime after January 1902 he settled on this more elaborate design, which he painted - and hoped to reproduce - in full color. But the color version was unsatisfactory, so Pyle had a photogravure plate made instead, and had the bookplate printed in sepia.

Pyle’s Latin motto - ITA PRIMO, ITA SEMPER - was one he had used before, on THE WONDER CLOCK title-page, the frontispiece of TWILIGHT LAND, and perhaps elsewhere. Roughly translated, it means, “Thus first, thus always,” or “As it was in the beginning, so it will ever be.”

The original painting, by the way, now belongs to The Brandywine River Museum.

A Nice Trade

“A Dream of Young Summer” by Howard Pyle (1901)

“As you know,” said Howard Pyle to the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in a letter of January 2, 1902, “I have always admired your work extremely - have always considered you as a representative of that steadfast and lofty effort toward an Art that cannot condescend to tricks and effects to catch the eye, but that speaks with a deeper intonation to the hearts and the souls of men.”

Saint-Gaudens seems to have felt much the same way about Pyle, and for several years the two had intended to exchange works. Finally, at the end of 1901, the sculptor sent a bronze cast of the “Head of Victory” - a “sketch” for the allegorical figure in his wonderful Sherman Monument.

“Head of Victory” by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Pyle received the piece on January 2. “I shall regard it as one of the treasures of my life,” he wrote the same day. “I care for it much more than I should for a more finished work; it is, as it were, a pure and noble thought from a large, and I am sure, a noble mind.” He also vowed to send “something in return that shall represent an earnest, even if an inarticulate effort of my Art.”

At last, on February 10, 1902 - after having trouble getting the 22 x 12" oil on canvas framed to his liking - Pyle shipped “A Dream of Young Summer”:

Now that it has been sent I feel horribly conscious that it is no adequate return for the beautiful “Victory” which I possess. The only thing that reconciles me to it is that it is sent with the most friendly good wishes in the world. Moreover, whatever its short-comings it is a sincere effort to express a thought.

“A Dream of Young Summer” wasn’t a custom-made piece, but something Pyle already had on hand: it had been published the previous year, in Harper’s Monthly Magazine for June 1901, accompanied by Edith M. Thomas’s poem of the same name (which may have been written for the picture, instead of the other way around - but I’ll explain myself in a later post, I hope).

The painting - which, by the way, Pyle and inscribed “To Augustus Saint Gaudens this Picture of Young Summer with the Fraternal Greetings of His Brother in Art” - eventually wound up in the hands of Pyle’s grandson, who presented it to the Brandywine River Museum, where you can see it today.

Unfortunately, I don’t know where Pyle’s particular copy of the “Head of Victory” is, but it was the topic of this news item in The Evening Journal of Wilmington in March 1904:

AN INTERESTING ART TREASURE

A great many people of Wilmington have doubtless seen the equestrian statue Sherman that stands in the Plaza at Fifth avenue in New York, for that work is not only local but national and it is, moreover, regarded by those who should know as being one of the five great equestrian statues of the world. Perhaps the finest part of the entire group is the figure of Victory and it is rather interesting to know that the study for the head, cast in bronze, is now in possession of an artist in Wilmington to whom it was given by Saint-Gaudens.

And Pyle’s student N. C. Wyeth mentioned it in a letter of October 29, 1905:

Mr. Pyle has gone to Chicago today to lecture, etc. Enclosed you will find a photo of him. The cast is a head St. Gaudin’s [sic] gave him. He had a photo taken of it so as to use it in an illustrated lecture in Chicago and Milwaukee. He considers the piece of sculpture (original study for the figure of “Victory” on the Sherman Statue, NY) a masterpiece.

Howard Pyle in Wisconsin

“I feel very much gratified indeed that my pictures should attract such favorable attention in Green Bay. They seem to have been a great deal cared for in the West and I do not think that they have anywhere met with a warmer reception then they have with you…”

—Howard Pyle to Deborah B. Martin, June 11, 1904

For those of you lucky enough to find yourselves in Wisconsin this winter, a major exhibit of Howard Pyle’s works will be on view from December 2, 2013, to February 7, 2014, at the Bush Art Center of St. Norbert College in De Pere, just outside of Green Bay.

On view will be some twenty-two original paintings that were acquired in the early 1900s by the Kellogg Public Library (later known as the Brown County Library), but which have since been purchased by the Green Bay and De Pere Antiquarian Society.

This is the largest collection of Pyle paintings west of the Mississippi - or the Susquehanna, for that matter. And the history of how it got there is interesting, if rocky, and involved lots of letter-writing, hand-wringing, and a lawsuit. But it ended well, since Pyle’s pictures illustrating Woodrow Wilson’s “Colonies and Nation” were kept almost all together as a set (a few from the series had been sold prior to their journey to Wisconsin in 1904) - as were those for his “Travels of the Soul.” (Pyle, by the way, made a special trip to Green Bay in 1905.)

So, go see the show! I only wish I could.

A Typical Yankee Named Hoyt

“Jack Frost’s Harvest” by Philip L. Hoyt in Harper’s Weekly for December 6, 1902

In an article N. C. Wyeth wrote about Howard Pyle - published in the Christian Science Monitor one hundred years ago today - he discussed an unnamed Pyle student:

Mr. Pyle's inordinate ability as a teacher lay primarily in his sense of penetration; to read beneath the crude lines on paper the true purpose, to detect therein our real inclinations and impulses. In short, to unlock our personalities. This power was in no wise a superficial method handed out to those who would receive. We received in proportion to that which was fundamentally within us.

I recall an instance as an illustration. One member, an ungainly lad from the back country of northern New England, found his way into Pyle classes. He had dreamed, in his remote village, of becoming an artist; of picturing his visions of cities he had never seen, and of the lives of the people therein.

He had come into the composition class week after week, with sketches of society folk and kindred subjects. They were, naturally, unconvincing and poor, but Mr. Pyle’s interest in them did not flag. Meanwhile he assiduously gathered from the fellow accounts of his life in the woods, of breaking snow roads, of gathering maple sap, of log driving, of corn huskings, and a myriad things. It began to dawn upon the Vermonter that his own life at home, the incidents of his own north country which he knew and loved were interesting, yes, intensely interesting. His pictures at once gained in vitality and importance. With Mr. Pyle's trenchant help, he had found himself. I doubt if Howard Pyle ever had a student that did not at some time or other experience some such awakening as this while under his direction.

This “ungainly lad” was Philip Langly Hoyt, born November 2, 1873, in Wentworth, New Hampshire, a few miles from the Vermont border. The son of a farmer, Hoyt studied with Pyle at the Drexel Institute, won a scholarship to the 1899 Summer School of Illustration at Chadds Ford, and was selected by Pyle to join the nucleus of his own art school when he founded it in 1900.

Hoyt seems to have taken fellow New Englander Wyeth under his wing when the latter arrived in Wilmington in 1902. In an error-ridden letter home, Wyeth wrote of him:

The fellow is a typical Yankee named Hoyt. He’s from Vermont [sic]. Perfect Habits. Shrewd and as economical as possible.

I had to get an easle of course and Pyle could get a $25 one for 12.60. Hoyt says Don’t ye dew it! Make it. He made a slendid one for himself, lumber (hard pine), iron fixings and all cost four dollars or a little less. Now it’s quite a piece of mechanism and needs a cabinetmaker’s skill to make one so I bought his for five dollars and he’s making himself a new one making a few improvments (which is to his great delight).

Hoyt remained in Wilmington until about 1904 or so, when he moved to Boston. Eventually he abandoned illustration and although he may not have actually lived in Vermont prior to meeting Wyeth, Hoyt did wind up there later: on the 1930 Census he is listed as a construction contractor in Hartford in Windsor County. He died in Vermont at the age of 90 in March 1964.

Photograph taken in Chadds Ford, PA, showing Pyle and his students seeing off Philip Hoyt, on or about September 1, 1899, at the close of the second Summer School of Illustration. From left to right: Robert L. Mason, Emlem McConnell, Frank Schoonover, Howard Pyle, Annie Hailey, Sarah Stilwell, Ellen Bernard Thompson, Anna Whelan Betts, Stanley Arthurs, Philip Hoyt (in straw boater), Bertha Corson Day.

N. C. Wyeth Meets Howard Pyle

Howard Pyle, photographed  by Arthur Ernst Becher in 1902

According to David Michaelis’ N. C. Wyeth: A Biography  it was 110 years ago today - October 25, 1902 - that Wyeth met Howard Pyle for the first time. Although Wyeth later convinced himself that the meeting happened on his 20th birthday (October 19th), his memory of it stuck with him. In an article he wrote for Christian Science Monitor of November 13, 1912 - just a year after Pyle's death - he described it this way:

A great stick of hickory is smoldering and gleaming fitfully in the fireplace before me. Its pungent fragrance scents the room. My pulse quickens to the magic aroma, and my thought flies back to a day in October 12 [sic 10] years ago when I first set eyes on Howard Pyle. He was standing, tall, broad and impressive, legs apart, hands clasped behind him, backed against another such open fire in his studio. The smell of burning hickory was in the air!

I had come to him, as many had before me, for his help and guidance, and his first words to me will forever ring in my ears as a vital symbol of his teaching and an unceasing appeal to my conscience.

“My boy, you have come here for help. If so, you are here to live your best, and to work hard!” His broad, kindly face looked solemn behind those words, and from that moment I knew that he meant infinitely more to me than a mere teacher of illustration. It was this commanding spirit of earnestness, and of love, that made his leadership distinctive, and which has perpetuated in the hearts of all his pupils a deep affection kindred to that which one holds toward his own parents....

In subsequent years, when asked to write about his teacher, Wyeth returned to this particular memory several times. Compare, for instance, the 1912 passage with this one from his introduction to Howard Pyle: A Chronicle of 1925:

A great stick of hickory is smoldering and gleaming in the fireplace before me. Its pungent fragrance scents the room. My pulse quickens to the magic aroma and my thought flies back to a day in October, eighteen [sic 23] years ago, when I first saw Howard Pyle. He was standing, tall, broad and impressive, legs apart, hands clasped behind him, backed against another such open fire in his studio. The smell of burning hickory was in the air.

I had come to him, as many had before me, for his help and guidance, and his first words to me will forever ring in my ears as an unceasing appeal to my conscience: “My boy, you have come here for help. Then you must live your best and work hard!” His broad, kindly face looked solemn as he spoke these words, and from that moment I knew that he meant infinitely more to me than a mere teacher of illustration. It was this commanding spirit of earnestness and of love that made his leadership distinctive, and which has perpetuated in the hearts of all his pupils a deep affection akin to that which one holds toward his own parents....

It’s remarkably similar, as are two other known variants of 1921 and 1925. But when Wyeth was asked to contribute an introduction (and a color frontispiece) to the “Brandywine Edition” of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood in 1933 (which also featured illustrations by his teenaged son Andy) he expanded on his earlier reminiscences, infusing them with much more myth and magic. In many ways Wyeth’s words reflect the best of Pyle’s own prose, so here’s the bulk of them, in honor of the 110th anniversary:

My most vivid recollection of Howard Pyle was gained during the first five minutes I knew him. He stood with his back to the blazing and crackling logs in his studio fireplace, his legs spaced apart, his arms akimbo. His towering figure seemed to lift to greater heights with the swiftly ascending smoke and sparks from the hearth behind him.

It happened on one of those blue and gold days in October. The air was sharp and keen. Moreover, it was my birthday [sic]. I was young, ambitious and impressionable. For years, it seemed, I had dreamed of this meeting. Success in winning this master’s interest and sympathy to the cause of my own artistic advancement seemed so much to ask, so remote, such a vain hope. But here I was at last, seated before him in the very room in which were born so many of the pictures I had breathlessly admired from boyhood. Paintings and drawings that had long since become a living and indispensable part of my own life.

And as Howard Pyle stood there, talking gently but with unmistakable emphasis, his large and genial countenance hypnotized me. The mobile mask of his face became more than individual. My rapid reflections were swept beyond the actual man. It was bewildering. I heard every modulation of his voice and I took note of his every word. Occasionally I would answer a question. I remember all this clearly. But a searching beyond his countenance persisted.

The soft top-light from the glass roof high above us poured down like a magical and illuminated mist over his magnificent head. The forehead was broad, spatial, and not too high, the frontal processes accented the shadowed caverns of the large and wide-set eyes. The well-defined brows were tremulously sensitive. Lifting toward the centre they would become ineffably wistful, then quickly dropping to a level line across the eyes the entire countenance became majestically severe, forceful, unrelenting. The recollection of the masks of Beethoven, Washington, Goethe, Keats, passed in swift succession before my vision and in a sudden grasp of the truth I realized that the artist’s face before me was actually a living composite of the men of history and romance which he had so magically and dramatically perpetuated on canvas. It was as though there existed a definite and precise genealogical tie between this living, pulsating countenance before me and the thrilling pictures of the men he had created whether of General Washington, Captain Kidd, Aaron Burr, Robin Hood, Sir Launcelot or numberless others. In a sudden relaxation of expression, certain curves and areas of the face would vividly suggest the soft mobility of Washington's features or the wise serenity of Franklin, or, perhaps, the nervous shrewdness of Jefferson.

In retrospect, and consequently with a better understanding of the processes of creative art, I have come to realize that power and conviction in dramatic expression (which is so salient a virtue in illustrative painting) lie fundamentally in its autobiographical nature - that, in each of us is something of everybody; if we but know, as artists, how to uncover and use it. Howard Pyle accomplished just this to startling degree as a phenomenal pictorial record he left testifies....

N. C. Wyeth, c.1903-04, via http://www.ncwyeth.org

Pyle Drives a Hard Bargain

“Cap’n Goldsack” by Howard Pyle (1902)

Henry Edward Rood, an assistant editor at Harper’s Monthly, got to see Howard Pyle’s original illustration for “Cap’n Goldsack” a few months before it was published in the July 1902 issue of the magazine. He wanted to buy it. Pyle wrote him on April 30, 1902:

I feel very much complimented that you should like “Captain Goldsack” and shall be very pleased for you to have it. Do you think that $75.00 is more than you care to give for it? If so I shall be glad for you to mention what you think would be sufficient value.

Pyle drives a hard bargain, doesn’t he? I don’t know if Rood accepted the offer - but I sure would.

The painting has yet to turn up: it was last seen at the Art Institute of Chicago in December 1903. It illustrated a poem of the same name by William Sharp:

CAP’N GOLDSACK

Down in the yellow bay where the scows are sleeping,
Where among the dead men the sharks flit to and fro -
There Cap’n Goldsack goes, creeping, creeping, creeping.
Looking for his treasure down below!

Yeo, yeo, heave-a-yeo!
Creeping, creeping, creeping down below -
Yo! ho!

Down among the tangleweed where the dead are leaking
With the ebb an’ flow o’ water through their ribs an’ hollow bones,
Isaac Goldsack stoops alow, seeking, seeking, seeking.
What's he seeking there amidst a lot o’ dead men’s bones?

Yeo, yeo, heave-a-yeo!
Seeking, seeking, seeking down below -
Yo! ho!

Twice a hundred year an’ more are gone acrost the bay,
Down acrost the yellow bay where the dead are sleeping:
But Cap’n Goldsack gropes an’ gropes from year- long day to day —
Cap’n Goldsack gropes below, creeping, creeping, creeping:

Yeo, yeo, heave-a-yeo!
Creeping, creeping, creeping down below -
Yo! ho!

“A True Portrait of an Imaginary Gentleman”

One of the more unusual pieces of “Pyleana” in existence is the mug seen here, which Howard Pyle decorated to help out the Salmagundi Club. The New York Times Saturday Review of Books and Art of April 12, 1902, explained:

The recent library dinner at the Salmagundi Club and the sale of ex libris mugs that followed the dinner constitute an annual function notable for its originality of conception and for the successful way in which a clever idea is working itself out. It was the fourth dinner at which the arbitrarily limited number of twenty-four mugs, decorated by well-known artists and numbered and registered in the library of the club, was sold at auction for the benefit of the library.

The painter Bruce Crane (who knew Pyle since the late 1870s, apparently) served as the auctioneer and, the Times said, “charm[ed] the money from the bidders’ pockets.” 

The mug signed by that accomplished illustrator, Howard Pyle, brought out some lively bidding before it was secured by Mr. W. E. Baillie of Bridgeport. Quite properly Mr. Pyle’s mug showed a literary as well as an artistic side. A pleasant-faced pirate in a dark sombrero was described opposite in a panel of quaint lettering as “The [sic] true portrait of an imaginary gentleman painted by Howard Pyle for the Salmagundi Club of New York, MCMII.”

Pyle’s mug, which is just shy of six inches in height, went for $100 and has since found its way to the Delaware Art Museum. It’s a nice little painting, but Pyle didn’t think much of it, as seen in this scrawling letter to William Henry Shelton, artist, club historian and member of the Library Committee.

Here’s a transcription:

Wilmington, Del. April 9th 1902

Dear Mr Shelton -

I am delighted to hear of the success of your “mug” sale. It seems preposterous that my half hour sketch should fetch so much as you say. I am sure I would not give a hundred dollars for it - or a hundred cents for that matter. I am glad to have been of use though and am

Faithfully yours

Howard Pyle

But Pyle was of use at least once more: the mug he contributed to the 1906 club fundraiser sold for $260. I can only hope that it didn’t get broken or wind up in somebody’s dishwasher and that it’ll turn up one day.

Howard Pyle’s Reading List

Headband for A History of New York (The Grolier Club, 1886) by Howard Pyle

“I asked Mr. Pyle for a list of books he would recommend to me to read this winter and he gave me the following saying that when I had read these to come for more.”

So wrote Allen Tupper True to his mother on October 13, 1902. Pyle’s reading list included these titles, which are all still readily available:

By Nathaniel Hawthorne...

• Twice-Told Tales (1837)
• Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)

By Washington Irving...

• The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., (1819)
• A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809)

By William Dean Howells...

• The Rise of Silas Lapham
• The Lady of the Aroostook (1879)

Not really hifalutin stuff, but True later explained, “Mr. Pyle’s list of books is rather queer but he seemed to think I would like and need light literature in connection with the grind I shall have at the studio.”

Of course, Pyle knew Howells personally and they collaborated on Stops of Various Quills, published in 1895.

Pyle also knew Hawthorne’s son, Julian, who interviewed him for an article in 1907. And his first (or second) known book illustration - in McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader (1879) - was for an excerpt from “A Rill from the Town Pump” from Twice-Told Tales. The Brandywine River Museum now owns the original art (but I could have, if I hadn’t chickened out when it was offered to me. I still kick myself.). Also, in 1900, Pyle supervised the illustration of Twice-Told Tales by his students for Complete Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co..

And the illustration shown above is one of three Pyle made for the Grolier Club’s 1886 edition of The History of New York.

H.P.S.A. Ahoy!

“The dim, shadowy forms of vessels riding at anchor in the night” by Howard Pyle (1889)

If only. In the correspondence of Howard Pyle’s students there are some intriguing hints of things that, unfortunately, never came to be. Allen Tupper True’s letter of July 29, 1902 (now at the Archives of American Art), describes a plan that was later scuttled:

What do you think is the latest thing that his brain has evolved? He is already making arrangements for having the school afloat next summer. We are going to charter a steamer - or rather a schooner and with part of the vessel for Mr. Pyle and his family and part for the school we are going to float all summer. There will be a bully chance to paint marines and if things pan out right the whole expense will be borne by this scheme. Mr. Pyle is to write an article or two which we shall illustrate and the proceeds are calculated to be enough to pay our expenses. This is the nucleus of the plan and Mr. Pyle’s plans usually go through. If next summer’s cruise is successful we will the next year go to the West Indies etc. etc. Do you wonder why we like Mr. Pyle?

[Note: The above picture comes from Part One of “Jamaica, New and Old” by Howard Pyle in Harper’s Monthly, January 1890. The original - whereabouts unknown - is in blue watercolor or ink on paper or Bristol board.]

“It was great to see him painting”

“In the Valley of the Shadows” by Howard Pyle (1902)

Mr Pyle likes very much to have us watch him work and the other day we went up to his house & watched him work on a picture (one of four) for the Xmas Century. It was great and seeing him produce such a thing was a treat & helped to strengthen my confidence in him. He is undoubtedly the greatest in his line and oh such a fine man.

So wrote Allen Tupper True - then a probationary student of Howard Pyle at Chadd’s Ford* - to his mother back home in Colorado on July 11, 1902. He was referring to Pyle’s illustrations for “The Travels of the Soul” which came out in The Century Magazine for December 1902. But which one did True see? Well, on November 24, 1902, he wrote his father and said:

How do you like his work in this (Xmas) Century? It was great to see him painting on that third one ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Shadows’ [sic]...

And where was Pyle “painting on that third one”? At what was then known as Lafayette Hall, the house where Pyle stayed when teaching at “The Ford” from 1898 to 1903 - just across the road from the studios at Turner’s Mill. Here’s what the place looks like these days:

This photo, by the way, comes from some kind of real estate listing that states: “The Brandywine School of Art was birthed in this home and the property was immortalized by Andrew Weyth in his painting ‘Painters Folly’". Surely they mean Andrew Wythe! Just kidding. Seriously, though, I don’t know where to begin....

* Although it’s now commonly or even officially called “Chadds Ford” - sans apostrophe - Pyle always referred to the village as “Chadd’s Ford”, so I’ve been following his precedent for the sake of consistency.

Imagination vs. Imitation

Howard Pyle’s “We started to run back to the raft for our lives” from “Sindbad on Burrator” by A. T. Quiller Couch in Scribner's Magazine for August 1902. See the original oil at the Delaware Art Museum.

“...I think you may easily see that in the making of a successful picture, the artist must compose and arrange his figures and effects altogether from his imagination, and that there is very little opportunity in the making of such a picture for him to copy exactly the position of a model placed before him in the lights and shadows which the studios afford. Nor is it likely that he can find any background to copy accurately and exactly into such an imaginative picture.

“For example: suppose an artist were called upon to paint a picture of a man running away from his enemies along the shores of a sea; with a gray sky overhead, and a strong wind blowing over the landscape. You see, he could not pose a model in the required position, for not only could no model hold such a position as that of a man running, with a center of gravity projected far beyond the point of impact; but even if the model were suspended in the air in such a position, yet he would not convey the idea of running. Apart from this it would be very difficult to find exactly the seascape to fit the picture, and exactly the landscape. For all this, the man must draw, not upon the facts of nature, but upon his imagination.

“If I have expressed myself at all clearly, you will see that what a man needs to paint an imaginative picture of such a sort, is not the power of imitation, but the knowledge to draw a figure from imagination.…”

Howard Pyle to William Merchant Richardson French (Director of the Art Institute of Chicago), June 22, 1905

Still in Howard Pyle’s Studio

Olive Rush and Ethel Pennewill Brown in Howard Pyle’s Studio in 1911 or 1912 (Blanche C. Grant, photographer)

I was looking for this picture in connection with my last post, but couldn’t find it at first since it’s not in the Olive Rush Papers, but in the Miscellaneous Photograph Collection at the Archives of American Art. It’s described there as “Olive Rush (at left) c. 1908” by an unidentified photographer. But the woman on the right is definitely Ethel Pennewill Brown and the photographer is Blanche C. Grant - her head and shoulder are reflected in the mirror as she stoops over the unseen camera. Grant took the picture when she was sharing Howard Pyle’s Wilmington studio with Brown and Rush in 1911 and possibly part of 1912.

The setting is the small anteroom through which one would pass after coming in the front door and before entering the studio proper. On the right is a “Rare Old Tyrolean Cabinet, carved Italian walnut, fitted with pewter basin and fount” that was Lot 161 in the auction of Pyle’s estate in June 1912. (It went for for $185.) And in the mirror is Pyle’s original pen and ink drawing, “Sir Kay showeth the mystic Sword unto Sir Ector,” from The Story of King Arthur.

“Sir Kay showeth the mystic Sword unto Sir Ector” by Howard Pyle (1902)

Howard Pyle’s Sketch Club

On November 24, 1902, Allen Tupper True wrote home to his father:

…Mr. Pyle’s latest innovation is a “Sketch Club” to meet once a week when we and he can get together around a long table in his studio for a “stag” evening. The event of the evening is to be an impromptu pen and ink composition the subject for which will be assigned just before commencing. Mr. Pyle is to sketch too and his idea seems to be that he shall be one of a jolly crowd for one evening a week. We will have beer, ginger ale and good tobacco which in this case do not mean as coarse as an affair as you might think.…

Pyle’s “innovation” was something he resurrected from his time in New York in the late 1870s - from the Salmagundi Sketch Club, in particular.

The compositional subject was just a word or phrase - “Idiocy,” “The End,” “The Conquerer,” “The Challenge” - and after it was assigned (or, perhaps, drawn from a hat, etc.) the artists would draw and eat and drink and talk and smoke.

Just imagine the groups that assembled each week or so in 1902-03: N. C. Wyeth, William J. Aylward, Philip R. Goodwin, Arthur Becher, George Harding, Allen True, Clifford Ashley, Henry Peck, Thornton Oakley, et al.... And the artist whose impromptu creation was deemed best would go home with Howard Pyle’s drawing.

Decoration for “A Song of Peace”

Howard Pyle’s “decoration” for Edwin Markham’s poem, “A Song of Peace,” appeared in Collier’s Weekly for June 14, 1902. And 108 years ago today - on June 20, 1902 - Augustus Saint-Gaudens wrote a “fan” letter to Pyle (not the first time, either) about this piece, declaring, “…The virility and poetry and the beauty of it are remarkable…”

Unfortunately, Saint-Gaudens’ letter has gone missing and the only evidence of it we have is the above line, quoted by Charles Abbott in his 1925 Pyle biography. Pyle’s reply, however, written on June 24, resides at Dartmouth College. In it, he offers to give the drawing to Saint-Gaudens and asks if he should “fill it out to a large square, completing the figures in procession.” Pyle sent the drawing in July, but I don’t know if he reworked it - or if it was burned in the sculptor’s studio fire in 1904 - as it has yet to come to light.

Note: Since writing this I’ve learned that the drawing was loaned by Mrs. Augusta Saint-Gaudens to the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1922, so perhaps it’s still out there, somewhere.

The Death of a Pyle Student, March 3, 1902

"They're After Us, John!" by John Henderson Betts (1898)

John Henderson Betts (born April 6, 1877) was one of Howard Pyle's more promising pupils at the Drexel Institute. His work was shown in the first exhibition of work done in the School of Illustration (1897) and Pyle featured one of his pictures in his article, "A Small School of Art" (Harper’s Weekly, July 17, 1897). Betts was also one of the ten students awarded scholarships to the first Summer School of Illustration at Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania, in 1898. While there he made six illustrations for The Boys of Old Monmouth by Everett T. Tomlinson (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1898), including "They're After Us, John!" He appears in these two snapshots taken that summer, on the porch of Washington's Headquarters, where the male students boarded:

Front row: William F. Weed, Clyde DeLand, Frank Schoonover. Back row: Stanley Arthurs, Winfield S. Lukens, John H. Betts (in shirt sleeves), Robert L. Mason

Top to bottom: Robert L. Mason, Stanley Arthurs, William Francis Weed, James Wood (an instructor in Drexel's Antique Class, who backed up Pyle that summer), John H. Betts, Clyde O. DeLand, Winfield S. Lukens

Coincidentally - and if my genealogical calculations are correct - John Henderson Betts was also the third cousin of his classmate Anna Whelan Betts (1873-1959) and her sister Ethel Franklin Betts (born 1878), both Pyle students. He married Mary Furman Smith on November 1, 1900.

Despite his promise, Betts is little remembered today, for on March 3, 1902, he came to a terrible end. The Germantown Guide for March 15, 1902, described what happened:

Germantown Artist's Awful Death


John Henderson Betts met a shocking death on Monday by falling down the elevator shaft from the eleventh floor of the Real Estate Trust Building, southeast corner of Broad and Chestnut streets. Mr. Betts was hurrying to keep an appointment with his father, Colonel Charles M. Betts, a wholesale lumber dealer, whose office is on the twelfth floor of the building. The only other passenger in the car was Mr. William A. Messinger, of Clayton, Pa., who alighted at the eleventh floor. He says he heard the doors of the elevator shaft behind him. Almost immediately after that he heard a noise as if the doors had been reopened, and a scream which caused him to look around in time to see Mr. Betts go headlong over the edge of the platform through the doorway and into the shaft. Albert F. Gault, the boy in charge of the elevator, said that just as he started the car Mr. Betts said something to the effect that he had passed his floor, and clutched at the doors. The lever was at once reversed and the next thing Gault knew his passenger had disappeared. The body was taken to the Morgue, where it was identified soon after, when it was removed to 2034 Spring Garden Street, the residence of the deceased's father, where the funeral services were held on Thursday morning. Mr. Betts resided with his wife, to whom he was married in 1900, on Pomona Terrace, and was in his twenty-fifth year. He was a graduate of the Friends' Central School, and four years ago finished a course under Howard Pyle, the celebrated illustrator, at the Drexel Institute. He at once established himself as an illustrator became very successful, having his studio at 430 Walnut street. Among the most conspicuous books he has illustrated are Edward Robins' "Washington and Braddock's Campaign" and "An Iron Horse Chase; or, a Boy's Adventures in the Civil War." Mr. Betts also illustrated John Habberton's "Some Boy's Doings," and had only recently completed four illustrations in color for Mr. Robin's "A Boy in Early Virginia." He also illustrated Charles Heber Clarke's "Captain Bluitt," and was engaged at the time of his death in the illustration of a magazine story by Julien Gordon (Mrs. Van Rensselaer Cruger). He had also contributed illustrations to the Century, Scribner's and other magazines.

A Preliminary Study, 1902

A while back, James Gurney posted some of Howard Pyle’s sketches for “Kidd on the Deck of the ‘Adventure Galley,’” drawn (by my calculations) between mid-August and mid-September 1902. As James aptly described them, “They have the flavor of a vision snatched from the ether, a snapshot from the swirling creative vortex, a half-remembered dream.” And while they are typical of the sketches I’ve seen, Pyle didn’t necessarily jump from these shorthand jottings to the final work, but would - at least occasionally and surely for his more ambitious works - do more careful drawings in between.

Here, for instance, is a pencil study - made only a few months before the Kidd sketches - for his painting “In the Meadows of Youth” which formed part of “The Travels of the Soul” published in The Century Magazine for Christmas 1902. As you can see, Pyle meticulously rendered the model’s blouse, but loosened up considerably in the final work. The figure in the drawing, by the way, is about 11 inches high and the figure in the painting is about 16 inches high (the painting itself is about 31.5 x 17.5 inches).

Note, too, that although this scan of the original plate is pretty poor by today’s standards, Pyle was thrilled when he saw the proofs and wrote to the publisher, “I wish to express to you my great and sincere admiration for the way in which you have reproduced my pictures of the ‘Travels of the Soul.’ I had never hoped to have such really great results, and it seems to me, apart from any question of artistic excellence, that the technical rendition of the work must certainly make a notable impression upon the magazine world. I do not see how it can be otherwise, for it appears to me that if you print the Magazine at all like the proofs, you will have reached the high-water mark of color reproduction.”

In 1903, Alonzo Weston Kimball purchased the original painting and its three companions and presented them to the Kellogg Public Library (now the Brown County Library) in Green Bay, Wisconsin, but they (and 18 of Pyle’s paintings for “Colonies and Nation” by Woodrow Wilson) were recently acquired by the Green Bay and De Pere Antiquarian Society.