“A mug, a pipe and a pleasant Friend or two”

In his 1918 history of New York City’s venerable Salmagundi Club, club librarian William Henry Shelton recalled a proposal he had made at the turn of the last century “which was the beginning of one of the most interesting customs of the club and one which has furnished the library with an ample income from that day to this.”

The idea suggested was that twenty-four mugs or steins be decorated each year and sold at auction at the library dinner for the benefit of the library. Each member of the club at that time had his own private mug, decorated by himself, or for him by a professional friend, with his name burned in under the glaze at the Volkmar Pottery. These suggested the library mugs, and limiting the yearly output for the library sale was a plan to keep up prices.

Although Howard Pyle was not a particularly active Salmagundian, he decorated at least two such mugs, the first in 1902 (which I discussed here) and the second on Saturday, December 30, 1905. We know the exact date because he hand-lettered it thus:

A mug, a pipe and a pleasant friend or two. Pray God send me the three. Drawn by Howard Pyle Dec. 30, 1905.

It’s not clear, however, if Pyle did his decorating at the club itself or in Wilmington and then shipped the unfired mug to New York, just as Edwin Austin Abbey (and perhaps other out-of-town contributors) had done. Pyle may well have been in New York that day - either to lecture at the Art Students’ League, and/or to hammer out his plan to take over McClure’s Magazine’s art department - but I have yet to find corroborating evidence.

At any rate, the mug was finally auctioned off on April 17, 1906. Shelton remembered:

There was a sharp contest in the bidding for the Abbey mug and also for a mug by Howard Pyle. Mr. George A. Hearn had sent in a bid of two hundred and fifty dollars for the Abbey mug. The two coveted pieces of delft, however, went into Mr. Saltus’s collection, the Abbey for four hundred and sixty-one dollars and the Pyle for two hundred and sixty dollars. This was real bidding, which was not always the case, as, for instance, in the following year a mug decorated by F. Luis Mora sold at the dinner-table for five hundred and five dollars. This was a sum sent over by Mr. Saltus, who was then in Nice, with the simple direction, “Buy me a mug.” He wished to place that sum in the library and he wished to do it in his own way. As it was known that he always wished his undivided contribution to be expended for one mug, it was the custom to begin the sale by offering the first choice, and when these large sums had to be expended on one mug there was an amusing competition of irresponsible bids, by such of us as were in the secret, until the desired sum was reached.

A syndicated news item about the sale noted that “Mr. Howard Pyle’s mug shows the fat and rosy face of an old time drinker and smoker.” And The New York Times of April 18, 1906, said, “Howard Pyle’s contribution shows the round, rosy face of a high roller of olden days, who looks as if he enjoyed his pipe and the flowing bowl.”

A number of the mugs J. Sanford Saltus purchased were given back to the club, but this one fell through the cracks and its present whereabouts are a mystery. Let’s just hope it didn’t fall on the floor.

The photo above - from the Salmagundi Club’s mug record book - is the only one that I’ve seen.

Howard Pyle Meets With John Sloan, May 1, 1906

According to his diary, John Sloan met Howard Pyle on this day in 1906. Sloan, then, was making his living as an illustrator, but also painting and etching like mad on the side. Howard Pyle, meanwhile, was enduring an odd stint in his life as the Art Editor of McClure’s Magazine, located at 44 East 23rd Street in New York City. (Incidentally, another probable occupant of the offices that same day was Willa Cather, who had recently joined the magazine’s staff and who had also recently presented Pyle with a copy of her book The Troll Garden.) After meeting with Pyle, Sloan wrote:

Made my first call on Howard Pyle, who is now Art Editor of McClure’s Magazine. Showed him my proofs, illustrations, etc. He treated me with courtesy. Said my work was good in “character” but just at present, you know - everything - not giving out much work - supplied ahead, etc., etc. Call again.

The two men may have met before, perhaps during one art function or another in Philadelphia in the 1890s, though this is the only documented encounter I’ve been able to locate. And Sloan’s sister Marianna is rumored to have been one of Pyle’s students (at least according to the Syracuse Post-Standard of February 14, 1904). Even so, Sloan didn’t sound very encouraged. Two weeks after that meeting - and in the wake of a crisis at the McClure offices - Sloan noted that, despite the exodus of a large chunk of the staff, including muckraking superstars Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell: “H. Pyle remains, I fear. Little chance for my work under the ‘boilermaker.’”

Ouch. Was Sloan reflecting on the steady stream of illustrators from Pyle’s “big art manufactory [sic]” (as Pyle student George Harding referred to it), who virtually flooded the market with what some artists no doubt deemed a clichéd way of making pictures? Maybe so.

The magazine did, however, publish a story, “The Debts of Antoine” by W. B. MacHarg, with Sloan’s pictures - dated ’06 - in the December 1906 issue. Whether Pyle commissioned these or not, I don’t yet know, but Sloan considered it “joyful news” when Pyle resigned from McClure’s that August.

A Howard Pyle Proto-Selfie

Howard Pyle’s 1906 Self-Portrait (Collection of the National Academy of Design)

Howard Pyle took lots and lots of photographs - at least according to his daughter Eleanor - but I don’t know if he ever took the equivalent of a “selfie.” That is, unless you count the ones he “took” in ink and paint.

Pyle’s earliest known self-portraits date from 1884 and decorated his verse “Serious Advice” in Harper’s Young People; the last known one came along over two decades later.

In May of 1905, Pyle was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design and was required to present a self-portrait to its permanent collection. Francis Davis Millet (who had notified Pyle of his election) assured him that “a portrait head is all that is needed & this isnt difficult for you, one of the pupils would be glad of the chance, I know.”

But Pyle didn’t get one of his pupils to do it - and he didn’t get around to doing it himself for almost a year. “I had thought ere this to have had the portrait in your hands,” wrote Pyle to the clerk of the Academy on April 16, 1906, “but many things have intervened to interfere with my purpose.”

At the time, Pyle was deep into his Art-Editorship of McClure’s Magazine and his large picture of “The Battle of Nashville” - but somehow he managed to deliver the painting on April 25th.

It’s funny, though, that - to my mind, at least - Pyle’s less “serious” self-portraits resemble him more than this one does. I assume he used a mirror in the making of it, so I flopped the painting and parked it in between photos taken in 1902 and 1906, and 1907 and 1910.

As you can see, the eyes and pince-nez are almost identical to the photo immediately to the right (which, I confess, I photoshopped to remove his hand), but Pyle doesn’t quite capture his slight underbite, nor the proportions of his mouth, nor the shape of his nose, and so on.

Then again, Pyle was a reluctant or resistant portrait painter - this despite the fact that he incorporated plenty of portraiture into his illustrations: just look at his depictions of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, or Oliver Wendell Holmes. The challenge of capturing the likeness and personality and spirit of someone seated directly in front of him (or reflected in a mirror) seems more than Pyle could handle. As he told his friend Cass Gilbert in a 1910 letter, shortly after sending what he considered to be a failed portrait of Mrs. Gilbert, “I do not like portrait painting; indeed, I hate it.”

N. C. Wyeth’s “Big” Cover Design

On a Friday night 107 years ago this month, N. C. Wyeth wrote to his “Mama” back in Hingham, Massachusetts:

This week has gone past like lightning. - Really, I never experienced such a “fast” week in my life. I've bent every effort, poured every bit of my inner self into my work this week, endeavoring to reach a much higher plane in my work, and secondly to satisfy Mr. Pyle in his wish for a “big” cover design. I have, I am positive, reached a higher plane, according to those opinions about me, including Mr. Pyle’s. I would like so much to have you see the picture. It’s one of an Indian chief with his right hand up, palm forward showing friendship. He is on his mustang with his feathered lance across his saddle.

The week has been very individual. I know I shall always remember it because it has been one of intense seriousness of purpose and more or less of a victory for me.

I should note that in the invaluable book, The Wyeths: The Intimate Correspondence of N. C. Wyeth, 1901-1945, this letter is dated July 2, 1906 - which was a Monday, not a Friday, as Wyeth states outright and implies twice, so its more probable date is July 6, 1906 (though I suppose there’s also a chance it could be June 29, 1906).

At any rate, Wyeth was writing in the midst of turmoil both personal and professional: he was a new husband, had a new house, had his first child on the way, and his work was in dizzying demand. He also had a very demanding teacher: “Mr. Pyle expects so much of me,” Wyeth had written a few weeks earlier. For better or worse - probably worse - Howard Pyle had taken charge of the art department of McClure’s Magazine that February and ever since had been pressuring his prize pupil to illustrate more and more for it.

But Wyeth was remarkably resilient, full of energy and ideas, and the pressure resulted in the creation of some of his strongest pictures, at least in these pre-Scribner’s Illustrated Classics days. And he was only 23-years-old!

Mother, Howard Pyle and Me

Howard Pyle, sometime poet - or, rather, writer of “jingling verses” as he called them - was also the unwitting subject of several poems. I already talked about an unpublished poem written by Joseph A. Richardson in 1883 and another written by Edwin Markham in 1900.

Now here’s one more, which I only discovered today. It’s by the Virginia-born author-illustrator-painter-stained glass artist (and “charming gadfly” according to Katharine Graham) Marietta Minnigerode Andrews (1869-1931) and it was published in the Washington, D.C. Evening Star on November 10, 1906. The credit line says it came from Andrews’ Echoes From a Washington Nursery, which I assume was a book, copyrighted that same year, but which I have, so far, found no trace. I also assume that a newspaper artist made the accompanying picture; Mrs. Andrews had been a student of Pyle’s old friend William Merritt Chase and the (very, very) little I’ve seen of her work is stronger than the crude illustration shown here.

MOTHER, HOWARD PYLE AND ME

I very much admire the style
Of tale that is told by Howard Pyle.
I think, somehow, it makes me good
To read about brave Robin Hood.

The fact is, I myself have see
That yeoman bold in “Lincoln green.”
I saw him when I went one day
With father to the matinee.

I thought the music very fine -
It made my eyes just dance and shine;
Yet by the fire I'd rather be -
Just mother, Howard Pyle and me!

Poor Richard

Howard Pyle drew “Poor Richard” for the programme/menu of the Franklin Inn Club’s celebration of Benjamin Franklin’s 200th birthday held on January 6, 1906, in Philadelphia.

Pyle was a member of the club, but did he attend the party? Maybe not: instead, he might have opted to go to the Century Association’s Twelfth Night at Eagleroost festivities in New York.

The Haunted House

“The Haunted House” was built, as it were, by Howard Pyle for Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s story “The Gold” in the December 1904 issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine. There, however, it was titled “Catherine Duke quickened her steps.” Pyle subsequently rechristened it and included it in various exhibitions of his work. So, among other places, it traveled to Boston in 1906 and to Minneapolis in 1907. In between those two shows, it sat in Pyle’s studio for a bit, as can be seen in the corner of this photo taken in the late spring or summer of 1906. (“The Suicide” is its neighbor, by the way.)

Pyle, then, was painting - or, more likely, pretending to paint - “The Battle of Nashville” for the Minnesota Capitol building and preparing to begin “The Landing of Carteret” for the Essex County Court House.
Both of these structures were designed by architect Cass Gilbert, to whom Pyle wrote on September 4, 1907:

I am going to send you a black and white picture of an old house which I call “The Haunted House.” The picture has been rather a favorite with me, and I think that you, as an artist, will appreciate the decorative scheme of black and white - say in a dining room. Anyway, I want you to have the picture, partly because I like it myself, and largely because I hope you may like it. So if you will accept it with my affectionate regards you will add another bond to our friendship.

Pyle inscribed the 24.75 x 16" black and white oil on canvas in red paint and shipped it off. I don’t know if Gilbert ever hung it in his dining room, but the original eventually landed back with Pyle’s grandson and its present and permanent address is now the Brandywine River Museum.

Twelfth Night, 1906

In 1904 Howard Pyle was elected a non-resident member of New York City’s prestigious Century Association - his name having been proposed by publisher J. Henry Harper and seconded by painter John White Alexander. Late the following year, Pyle was asked to design the invitation and program for the club’s traditional Twelfth Night celebration, to be held on January 6, 1906.

Either out of his own enthusiasm, or a desire to impress his fellow members, Pyle turned what should have been a quick and casual job into something much more ambitious. “I am afraid you are taking the Twelfth Night drawing too seriously,” warned his friend Frank Millet, who was coordinating the project (and who later went down with the Titanic):

The committee is very anxious to have something to send out with the notices which must be issued soon and they do not expect an elaborate work nor would they desire to give you much trouble about it.... Dr Curtis apparently dreams of something which in a few lines of the pencil will illustrate fully his description of the revels at Eagle-roost. But you can see from the old programs I sent you that elaboration is not necessary.

Millet wrote that on November 19, 1905, but I gather it was too late for Pyle to rein himself in. The invitation (which was also issued in grey-blue wrappers) and the program were printed under his supervision by John M. Rogers on Orange Street (“opposite the Old Malt House,” reads the colophon) in Wilmington, Delaware. Rogers had, among other things, printed Pyle’s Catalogue of Drawings Illustrating the Life of Gen. Washington and of Colonial Life, The Ghost of Captain Brand, and The Divinity of Labor - all in 1897 - and The Constitution and By-Laws of the Howard Pyle School of Art in 1903.

In addition to the drawings, Pyle did all the lettering seen here, except for the verse stanzas in “Centuria’s Call” and the portion of the paragraph beneath “The Programme of the Festival”: these were set in Fifteenth Century (later known as Caslon Antique), which Pyle began to use almost as soon as it was issued by the type foundry of Barnhart Brothers & Spindler.

And yet, for all his work, Pyle may not even have attended the Twelfth Night festivities: instead, he may have gone to the Franklin Inn Club’s dinner - for which he had also decorated the program cover - held the same evening in Philadelphia.

(By the way, Dr. Edward Curtis (1838-1912), whom Millet mentioned above, co-performed the autopsy on the body of Abraham Lincoln in 1865.)

November 3, 1906

On November 3, 1906, Basil King, author of “The Hanging of Mary Dyer,” wrote to Howard Pyle:

Permit me to thank you for the beautiful illustrations with which you have ennobled - the word is just - my little story of Mary Dyer, in the November issue of McClure’s. I cannot but feel that if I had only seen the illustrations first, I should have written a better tale. I have to thank you, too, and most sincerely, for the kind suggestions with regard to one or two details in the story, that were incorrect. It was the more important that Mary Dyer should come out of the prison with her hands unbound - as you represented her - from the fact that in the scene on the scaffold, which is absolutely historical, she is spoken of as though, at first, her hands were free. Until you pointed it out, I had not noticed the inconsistency in my own narrative. Again let me offer you my most genuine thanks.

The painting King refers to, "At her appearing the multitude was hushed, awed by that air she wore" (5 x 7.4" in the magazine, 21.5 x 30.5" in the flesh), has also gone by the more prosaic “Mary Dyer Being Led to The Scaffold.” According to my notes, George L. Dyer purchased it and its two companion paintings (both about 16 x 24") directly from Pyle. On October 31, 1921, the two companion paintings were stolen from a private residence in East Orange, New Jersey, and never recovered. This one, though, now belongs to the Newport Historical Society in Rhode Island.

December 17, 1906

A detail from "The Landing of Carteret" by Howard Pyle

After resigning from McClure's Magazine in the summer of 1906, Howard Pyle threw himself into work on “The Landing of Carteret”, his mural for the Essex County Court House in Newark, New Jersey. It had been commissioned by architect Cass Gilbert and was the largest thing Pyle had yet tackled - about six feet high and 16 feet wide - and it was supposed to be completed and installed by the end of the year.

On October 16, 1906, Pyle anxiously wrote to fellow muralist Edwin Howland Blashfield, “my work upon my picture has hardly advanced beyond the elementary stages.” But by December 1, he was able to report to Cass Gilbert, “I have laid everything else aside and have been working unremittingly upon it Sundays and holidays as well as other days. I now hope to have the painting completed, D.V., perhaps by the 15th and almost surely by the 20th of the month.”

On Sunday, December 16, Gilbert and his wife inspected the painting in Wilmington. Pyle was still at work, however, as on the following day he wrote the following letter to sculptor Thomas Shields Clarke:

1305 Franklin Street,
Wilmington, Delaware.

December 17th 1906

Dear Mr Clarke:—

I do not know how I can sufficiently thank you for the most interesting document with seals attached which you sent me.

It is exactly the kind of thing which interests me and you have guessed it as by intuition[.]

Not only is it valuable to me in itself but it came just at the opportune moment when I wanted precisely such a detail to put into my picture of the Landing of Carteret, which I am painting for the new Essex Co Court House.

Sometime, perhaps, you may see it in the picture.

With best wishes for the season and with heartiest regards I am—

Very Sincerely Yours

Howard Pyle

According to news reports, Pyle finished the mural on Christmas Eve, but for all the hurry it wasn’t set in place until March 9, 1907.

I first encountered the above letter in 1992 and had despaired of ever figuring out who “Mr Clarke” was, but I just learned that Thomas Shields Clarke also gave “seven old vellum documents, with very interesting seals” to his alma mater, Princeton University, according to the Princeton Alumni Weekly for May 26, 1909. Below is a scan of the original letter which features what Pyle called his “dreadful chirography.”

Pyle Students at 1616 Rodney Street, 1906

Here is a photograph of Clifford Warren Ashley - wearing a smock - and Henry Jarvis Peck in their studio at 1616 Rodney Street, Wilmington, Delaware. The relative spareness of the space suggests that it was taken in the spring of 1906, soon after they had moved in (plus the painting on the easel is Peck’s “Swiftly He Put the Questions” for "=“Love in the Mist” by Clare Benedict, printed in Harper’s Monthly Magazine for October 1906 and illustrators generally needed to deliver finished art a few months before publication).

The other occupants of the newly erected building (now known as Schoonover Studios) were all “graduates” of the Howard Pyle School of Art: N. C. Wyeth, Arthur True, Harvey Dunn, Stanley Arthurs, and Frank Schoonover. Perhaps one of these men was the photographer.

Incidentally, on the wall behind Peck hangs a large print of Pyle’s “Lady Washington’s Arrival at Headquarters, Cambridge” (1896). A modern photo of the studio from a similar vantage point can be seen here.

Photograph of Howard Pyle, 1906

Here is Howard Pyle, with palette and brush in hand, painting - or, more likely, pretending to paint - “The Battle of Nashville” in his studio at 1305 Franklin Street in Wilmington, Delaware.

This particular print, once owned by Frederick Hill Meserve, is a detail of a larger photograph probably taken in the early summer of 1906, just as Pyle was finishing up his painting, which he copyrighted on July 9. That fall, he sent it to St. Paul, Minnesota, where it was installed - and may still be seen - in the Governor’s Reception Room in the State Capitol building, designed by Cass Gilbert.