In 1776 - The Conflagration

Behold Howard Pyle’s exquisitely delicate depiction of the fire that destroyed part of lower Manhattan 240 years ago.

He made this pen and ink drawing - most likely in the winter of 1892-93 - as a headpiece for Thomas A. Janvier’s two-part article on “The Evolution of New York” (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1893), and he must have used this 1730s engraving - “A View of Fort George with the City of New York from the SW.” - as reference.

Howard Pyle, Costume Designer

Five costume designs for “Springtime” by Howard Pyle (1909) - via Northeast Auctions

Howard Pyle’s stint as a Broadway costume designer has been all but forgotten. So, let’s remember:

In 1909, impresario Frederic Thompson - co-creator of Luna Park on Coney Island and the Hippodrome Theatre in Manhattan - began production on a play to promote his wife, actress Mabel Taliaferro. The star vehicle - called “Springtime” - was set to debut that fall and Thompson garnered early publicity for it by changing his wife’s confusingly pronounced name to the mononymous “Nell” and by signing on the then-well-known Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson to write the script, Harry Rowe Shelley to compose the score, and Howard Pyle to design the costumes.

Harper’s Weekly later spelled out the plot of the fluffy romance, set in Louisiana at the end of the War of 1812:

The action of the drama immediately precedes and follows the battle of New Orleans, and the scenes are laid in or near the plantation of M. de Valette, the head of an old French family, who hates his American neighbors.

M. de Valette has arranged a marriage for his daughter, Madeleine, with his cousin, Raoul de Valette, although the two persons most concerned in the matter have never seen each other. Implicitly obedient to her father, Madeleine offers no objection to the parental plans, but when Raoul is introduced to her, she is unable to conceal her disappointment at finding him elderly and unattractive. While preparations are being made for the wedding, Madeleine happens to meet Gilbert Steele, the son of an American planter, who has come to see M. de Valette in regard to a sale of property. These two young people immediately become deeply interested in each other, but Gilbert apparently departs in anger when M. de Valette orders him from the plantation and gives him to understand that his daughter is betrothed. Madeleine, desiring to explain the situation to Gilbert, steals away from the plantation, outside whose precincts she had never before set foot. She meets the young American in the forest, where he has a rendezvous with a band of backwoodsmen who are to support General Jackson in battle on the next morning. Here Madeleine becomes aware of her love for Gilbert, renounces any intention of marrying Raoul, and insists upon accompanying her lover to the front. However, military discipline necessitates her return home, only to learn there that she has been disgraced in the eyes of her stern father and disowned by him. While dazed by this inexplicable reception to her, she is cruelly shocked by the sudden announcement of Gilbert’s death in battle, and loses her reason. But the report proves to have been erroneous, and through the stimulus of Gilbert’s return and her father’s forgiveness, Madeleine regains her faculties and all ends happily.

Interestingly, while Thompson was getting his ducks in a row, Pyle’s “When All the World Was Young” was published in Harper’s Monthly for August 1909 (issued in mid-July). The picture, painted about a year earlier, could practically serve as an illustration for “Springtime” and it may well have inspired Thompson to seek Pyle out.

“When All the World Was Young” by Howard Pyle (1908)

Or... it was pure coincidence and Thompson didn’t see the picture at all but was simply lured by Pyle’s respectability, reputation, and name-recognition. At any rate, soon after meeting with Thompson, Pyle got the blessing of Harper and Brothers (with whom he was under exclusive contract for illustrations) and accepted Thompson’s proposed $2500 fee. Before long, Pyle’s involvement with the play was being reported in the press.

from The New York Times (August 14, 1909)

As an acknowledged expert on American historical dress, Pyle must have found his task relatively easy, but, stickler that he was - “I am very anxious to get the costumes as correct as possible,” he said - he wound up seeking more precise information on at least one character’s outfit from author and New Orleans native George Washington Cable. But that’s a tale for another day.

In all, the commission took Pyle three weeks and resulted fourteen (known) watercolors - each measuring upwards of 25 x 18 inches - which would serve not only as guides for the costumes, but as stand-alone pictures. He delivered them by early September and then left town with his wife and two eldest sons on a few-days’ steamboat trip on the Chesapeake Bay and Pocomoke River.

How closely Pyle’s designs resembled the finished costumes is hard to say. The few photos of the cast are in black and white and the shapes and sizes of the actors often differed from Pyle’s idealized conceptions - despite the fact that the cast and Pyle were hired at about the same time. For example, William B. Mack, as M. de Valette, had broader shoulders than Pyle imagined.

Costume design for “M. de Valette” by Howard Pyle (1909) - via Northeast Auctions

Photo of “M. de Valette” (William B. Mack) and “Madeline” (Mabel Taliaferro) in “Springtime”

And Samuel Forrest was a much older-looking Raoul and wore looser-fitting trousers.

Photo of “Raoul de Valette” (Samuel Forrest) and “Madeleine” (Mabel Taliaferro) in “Springtime”

Costume design for “Raoul de Valette” by Howard Pyle (1909) - via Northeast Auctions

But the costumes of Madeleine and Gilbert Steele - as worn by Mabel Taliaferro and Earle Browne - are almost dead on.

Costume design for “Madeleine” by Howard Pyle (1909) - via Northeast Auctions

Costume design for “Gilbert Steele” by Howard Pyle (1909) - via Northeast Auctions

Photo of “Madeleine” (Mabel Taliaferro) and “Gilbert Steele” (Earle Browne) in “Springtime”

“Springtime” opened in previews at the Garrick Theatre in Philadelphia on October 4, 1909, and although Tarkington, Wilson, and Thompson were there, it is not yet known if Pyle attended that or any other performance of the show, either in Philadelphia or during its New York run at the Liberty Theatre, which began on October 19. Pyle’s work, however, did not go unnoticed: the day after the Broadway premiere, the New York Evening Sun commented:

Springtime bloomed at the Liberty Theatre last night not only on the stage but in the lobby. The audience entered the theatre through a bower of roses, carnations and chrysanthemums, and on the few blank spaces left on the walls hung the exquisite costume sketches which Howard Pyle had designed for his play. Oddly enough, though, none of the costumes on stage looked half as beautiful as these sketches did.

And, in referring to Pyle, the Christian Science Monitor of November 3, 1909, said:

He has succeeded in gaining some brilliant effects and has combined his picturesque colors into impressive groups which give a striking effect upon the stage. He has successfully aided in creating a suitable atmosphere for this romantic play.

Although reasonably well-received, “Springtime” was not a huge success: it closed on Christmas in New York after only 79 performances and it more or less disappeared from the boards in 1910, after travelling to several different cities and appearing in “novelized” form (often illustrated with photos of the cast) in various periodicals. It was resurrected by at least one stock company in Rhode Island in 1913, and perhaps others here and there. And in 1914 it was made into a 5-reel silent movie, directed by Will S. Davis and starring an entirely new cast, but copies of or stills from the film have not yet been found, so it’s impossible to tell if the costumes followed Pyle’s designs.

The watercolors, by the way, went home with Mabel Taliaferro (the “Nell” rebranding having been abandoned), where they were hung as a frieze in her dining-room, and then weathered her bitter divorce from Thompson (she accused him of “extreme and repeated cruelty”) two years after “Springtime”’s run. In 1916 she sold all fourteen paintings to Francis Patrick Garvan and his wife, Mabel Brady Garvan - owners of a half dozen other Pyle originals - and at least some of them remained in the family for the next one hundred years - until this weekend, that is, when five will be sold at Northeast Auctions in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Who knows what happened to the other nine pictures? Maybe someone will tell me.

Costume design for “Julie” (played by Sallie Brent) by Howard Pyle (1909) - via Northeast Auctions

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)

George Washington’s First Inauguration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Inauguration of Washington at New York” by Howard Pyle

“It looks very much posed”

The above photograph, showing Howard Pyle with “The Evacuation of Charlestown” on his easel in his Wilmington studio, has now and then been dated 1897 and 1898.

But 1897 is incorrect because Pyle only started the painting in mid-1898: Frank Schoonover remembered that Pyle (his teacher at the time) was working on it during the Drexel Institute’s first Summer School of Illustration - which officially opened on June 23, 1898:

I recall that Mr. Pyle set up a very poor three-legged easel on the lawn in front of the house at Chadds Ford, and put his canvas on the easel. Miss Ellen Bernard Thompson...was painting something on the lower side of the road, and just beyond her was the Indian painter, Angel DeCora. There were some chairs and books of engravings of Colonial ships of the line out on the porch, and there were also the Pyle children playing around in the yard. The sky was very blue that day, with many floating clouds. Mr. Pyle asked me to fasten the canvas so that it would not shake, so I went back into the house and got the things needed.

Mr. Pyle then sat down on a kitchen chair and started to work under an apple tree, but he had no mahl stick. Then he said, “Frank, I see a fine straight sucker up there - climb up and cut it off.” I did so...

It was amazing to see him do this painting with so many distractions such as the children’s running around and so forth.... The painting has a shadow across the water like the shadow of the lawn, and the sky is as it was that day at Chadds Ford with the drifting clouds making shadows on the uneven lawn, which was much the color of the water in the picture. This was a lesson to all the students to interpret the things around them when painting.

“The Evacuation of Charlestown” was later packed up and hurried off to be photographed and made into a half-tone plate, just in time to appear in Scribner’s Magazine for September 1898. The Delaware Art Museum now owns the original painting (oil on canvas 23.25 x 35.25" - if you’re keeping score).



But back to the above photo: 1898 is probably the wrong date, too. Years ago, looking in a box at the Delaware Art Museum’s library, I saw - I think - two glass-plate negatives made by Cyrus Peter Miller Rumford. There, too, I saw Rumford’s scribbled notes stating that these were “Portraits of Howard Pyle for Home Journal ’99” and (provided I’m reading my own scribbles correctly) it seems that Rumford arrived with his camera at Pyle’s Wilmington studio at 3.00 p.m. one January day in 1899 and took a total of four photos.

Rumford, who had turned 26 that month, was a recent Harvard graduate (Class of 1897) and already a prize-winning photographer. And, apparently, either from his own or Pyle’s initiative he made the photos for an article in the April 1899 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal, titled “The Journal’s Artists in Their Studios” - but for some reason the magazine chose not to print them.

Pyle’s own opinion of the photos sounds mixed: on February 11, 1899, he dictated the following letter:

Wilmington, Del.

My dear Mr Rumford:

I am very much obliged to you for the photograph of myself in my studio. It looks very much posed, but that is the fault of the subject and not of the photographer. It was very kind of you to remember me.

Once more thanking you,

I am

Very truly yours

Howard Pyle

February eleventh.

I don’t know why Pyle says “the photograph” and not “the photographs” - maybe Rumford only sent a print of what he considered the best. But “very much posed” is about right: these two known photos show a seated Pyle - who usually stood at his easel - stiffly “at work” on the already-finished “Evacuation of Charlestown”.

I should note, too, that Pyle’s letter to Rumford was handwritten by Pyle’s secretary, Anna W. Hoopes, and although it appears to be signed by Pyle, the signature is, in fact, the work of Miss Hoopes as well. In a 1935 talk she explained:

When rushed at the end of the day with correspondence, [Mr. Pyle] often asked me to sign his letters; and I became so proficient at imitating his signature, that he once made me promise not to copy his handwriting, jokingly remarking that sometime I might want to sign his checks.

The Good, Aged Doctor

“The Good, Aged Doctor” by Howard Pyle (1899)

“The Good, Aged Doctor” - or, more precisely, “The good, aged Doctor, the appearance of whose rotund figure on the streets was the signal for the Parisians to doff their hats” - was one of four illustrations Howard Pyle made for James Barnes’s “The Man for the Hour” in McClure’s Magazine for December 1899.

Benjamin Franklin is, of course, “the good, aged doctor”; the street in Paris is most likely a particular one, but I haven’t yet figured out which.

Pyle probably painted this (and its three companions) in mid-1899, while conducting the Drexel Institute’s second Summer School of Illustration at Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. I assume this only because his student and future sister-in-law, Ellen Bernard Thompson, made two pictures for this same article at that time. Pyle also probably showed his and Thompson’s pictures at an exhibition of work made by Pyle and by his class for various Christmas 1899 periodicals at the Drexel Institute January 15-26, 1900, and subsequently at Earle’s Galleries in Philadelphia.

I never really thought much of this image, perhaps because the black and white magazine reproduction (see below) flattens and sucks much of the life out of the complex composition. But the original 18.25 x 12.5" oil on board - which is primarily in black, white, and red (and maybe yellow, unless that’s old varnish), yet seems almost full-color - is quite lovely. It’s also for sale: after over a century in the hands of one family - which obtained it from Pyle himself, apparently - it’s going on the block Wednesday, December 12, 2012, at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers in Chicago. That’s tomorrow!

P.S. The painting sold for $29,375.00 (including buyer’s premium).

“The Good, Aged Doctor” in McClure’s Magazine for December 1899

“Reading the Declaration before Washington’s Army, New York, July 9, 1776”

“Reading the Declaration before Washington’s Army, New York, July 9, 1776” by Howard Pyle (1892)

According to George Washington’s General Orders of July 9, 1776:

The Hon. The Continental Congress, impelled by the dictates of duty, policy and necessity, having been pleased to dissolve the Connection which subsisted between this Country, and Great Britain, and to declare the United Colonies of North America, free and independent States: The several brigades are to be drawn up this evening on their respective Parades, at Six OClock, when the declaration of Congress, shewing the grounds and reasons of this measure, is to be read with an audible voice.

The General hopes this important Event will serve as a fresh incentive to every officer, and soldier, to act with Fidelity and Courage, as knowing that now the peace and safety of his Country depends (under God) solely on the success of our arms: And that he is now in the service of a State, possessed of sufficient power to reward his merit, and advance him to the highest Honors of a free Country.

One hundred and fifteen years later, illustrator Howard Pyle was commissioned to commemorate the event for an article, “How the Declaration Was Received in the Old Thirteen,” by Charles D. Deshler in the July 1892 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.

Letters from Pyle (now at the Morgan Library in New York City) help to pin-point the creation of picture shown here: Pyle wrote to Arthur B. Turnure, then the art editor of Harper’s Monthly, on December 12, 1891, “I have not yet had an opportunity of looking over the MS of ‘How the Declaration was Received.’ I will read it, however, at the earliest opportunity and report to you as you desire.”

Then, on January 3, 1892, Pyle informed Turnure, “Your letter is received and I will give the very earliest attention possible to ‘How the Declaration was Received.’”

Three days later, Pyle said, “I hope, if all goes well and I complete the work I am now upon that I shall be in New York on Friday, I shall then bring you a plan of...‘How the Declaration was Received.’”

So, unless Pyle’s plans went awry, on Friday, January 8, he visited Turnure at Franklin Square in lower Manhattan and talked over his ideas. But whatever was discussed and whenever it was discussed, on January 29, Pyle wrote, “I send you to day by Express, two pictures. One of them is illustrative of ‘How the Declaration Was Received’ - Washington having the Declaration read to the troops.”

Subsequently, Pyle’s black and white oil on illustration board - measuring some 23.5 x 17.5 inches - was engraved on a 6.5 x 4.8" block of wood by Albert Munford Lindsay (who later studied with Pyle at the Drexel Institute).

Looking out the window on this July evening in New York, Pyle and Lindsay seem to have nailed the light just right. I like that.

Eventually, the painting wound up in the hands of Harold S. Schutt, who gave it to the Brandywine River Museum in 1980.

(On personal note, this engraving was reproduced in Jean Fritz’s Alexander Hamilton, The Outsider, to which I added some illustrations of my own.)

“An Old-time May Day in ‘Merrie England’”

“An Old-time May Day in ‘Merrie England’” by Howard Pyle (1878)

About a year after Howard Pyle made his illustration for “The Merrie Month of May” - used on the cover of St. Nicholas for May 1877 - he revisited the topic of “May Day” in the illustration shown here. It illustrated “The Story of May-Day” by Olive Thorne in St. Nicholas for May 1878.

In his scrapbook, Pyle wrote, “This picture was ordered by St Nicholas on the strength of the Carnival in Phila.” And of that picture Pyle scribbled: “This was my first seriously ordered work. I received the commission to paint this picture after having completed a drawing for Harper’s Weekly called a ‘Wreck in the Offing’. It is a labored composition but was much liked.”

“Carnival, Philadelphia, 1778” appeared in “The Battle of Monmouth Court-House” by Benson J. Lossing in the June 1878 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. The original black and white gouache painting is now at the Delaware Art Museum. It differs slightly from the engraving shown here; evidently, the engraver altered Pyle’s image, or - more likely, I think - Pyle tweaked it after it was engraved, perhaps to ready it for the Salmagundi Sketch Club’s exhibition at the Kurtz Gallery in February 1879. At which time, the New York Herald heralded it as “a careful and good scene at carnival time in Philadelphia in colonial days.”

“Carnival, Philadelphia, 1778” by Howard Pyle (1878)

“I hope sometime for you to see the original”

“The Attack upon the Chew House” by Howard Pyle (1898)

On April 19, 1898, Howard Pyle wrote to a fellow member of the Mahogany Tree Club:

Wilmington Delaware

April 19th 1898

Dear Mr Cadwalader: -

I send you with this a reproduction of my picture of the attack upon Chew House.

It does not, of course, give any suggestion of the color - which was in cool and luminous greys - but it will at any rate indicate the arrangement of the “composition”

I hope sometime for you to see the original

Sincerely Yours,

Howard Pyle

To John Cadwalader Esq
Philadelphia
Penna -

I echo Pyle’s hopes. The tiny reproduction of the picture shown here, from Henry Cabot Lodge’s “The Story of the Revolution” in Scribner’s Magazine for June 1898, does little justice to the original oil on canvas, which is indeed luminous - and big - some 23.25 by 35.25 inches.

Notes from a 1949 conversation between Pyle’s student Frank Schoonover and Pyle’s secretary Gertrude Brincklé reveal these details about the painting:

Some of Mr. Pyle’s students (including Schoonover and [Clyde] Deland) went to Germantown and photographed the house from the angle you see in the painting. On this side of the steps where the men are standing there was a green bench with flowerpots on it. The students told Mr. Pyle about it, and he said that was a good idea, and that if it were there at the time the photograph was taken, it would probably always be there - even at the time of the battle.... Some of the students posed for the painting, Mr. Schoonover included.

Pyle most likely painted the picture in March 1898. He then put it on view, briefly, in Philadelphia before shipping it to New York to be photographed and engraved for the magazine. After his hopes that it and the other eleven pictures in the series would be purchased and hung in the Library of Congress were dashed due to some legal technicality, it was exhibited here and there over the next several years. In a review of a 1905 Pyle show, The American Art News said of the "The Attack on the Chew Mansion" [sic]: “The composition is excellent, and the drawing and color make it one of the finest of modern historical paintings.” Hear, hear!

“The Attack upon the Chew House” - also known as “The Battle of Germantown” - now lives at the Delaware Art Museum.

Howard Pyle’s Wedding Pictures

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

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

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

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

“A Quaker Wedding” by Howard Pyle (1885)

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

“A Kentucky Wedding” by Howard Pyle (1882)

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

“Hey, black cat! hey, my pretty black cat”

“Hey, black cat! hey, my pretty black cat” by Howard Pyle (1891)

“I send you to-day the three drawings for Giles Corey Yeoman and return enclosed the MS.,“ wrote Howard Pyle to Arthur B. Turnure of Harper & Brothers on January 6, 1892. “I hope you will like the drawings; I do not know whether it was doing them for a new Art Editor or not but I found a considerable difficulty in getting them to my own satisfaction. I hope now they may be done to your satisfaction.”

“The pictures are not yet dry, be careful in unboxing them,” he added.

“Hey, black cat! hey, my pretty black cat” was one of the set - perhaps the best one - of four (not three) paintings (not drawings) Pyle made for Mary E. Wilkins’ “Giles Corey, Yeoman” - almost a year before its appearance in Harper's New Monthly Magazine for December 1892.

Pyle liked the project. Back on October 29, 1891 - and just after reading the manuscript - he had written to Harper’s previous art editor, Frederick B. Schell:

It is one of the best short stories that I have ever had given me to illustrate. It is told with a great deal of power and strength. It seems to have the very tone and local color of the time. I shall be most happy to undertake it and to do my best with it...

It’s hard to imagine what exactly the as-yet-missing original black and white oil painting looks like. Even so, this 4.8 x 7.2" wood-engraving by A. E. Anderson nicely captures the creepy mood of Pyle’s simple, yet powerful composition.

New-Year’s Hymn to St. Nicholas

My blogging slowed drastically due to a book project that proved more time consuming than I expected. But maybe I can balance or juggle more in 2012. Until then, take a look at Howard Pyle’s “New-Year’s Hymn to St. Nicholas” which he painted in May 1880 for “A Glimpse of an Old Dutch Town” by Mrs. M. P. Ferris (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1881).

A “Thanksgiving-Time Fancy” from Howard Pyle

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

Perhaps Not Without Snap and Go

"On sped the light chestnut, with the little officer bending almost to the saddle-bow"

On this date 120 years ago - July 15, 1891 - Howard Pyle shipped the picture seen here to F. B. Schell, head of the art department at Harper & Brothers. “I think myself that it is perhaps not without snap and go,” Pyle remarked in a letter of the same day.

He had only started painting it some two weeks earlier. “I suppose I had better first of all, do the Battle of Monmouth illustration for the Weekly, had I not?” he asked Schell on June 30. “And will you kindly tell me if Mr. Davis especially prefers it in ink or whether he would be as well satisfied if I made it in wash? I think I would prefer doing it in wash although I will do the best I can in any medium that you and Mr. Davis may prefer.”

“Mr. Davis” was Richard Harding Davis, writer, bon vivant, and editor of Harper’s Weekly - who Pyle admired for “putting lots of ‘blood’ and ‘grit’ into the paper”. Evidently, Davis and Schell preferred a pen and ink illustration (which would be much less expensive to reproduce than a wood-engraving), but, as Pyle explained on July 15, “I found upon consideration and trial that the subject did not admit of it and so had to use the other medium.” The “other medium” in this case was black and white oil, which often fell under Pyle’s broad term “wash”.

Pyle also apologized for having “so long delayed doing the work” since Davis had handed him the manuscript on or about June 16. But the details had taken a few weeks to hammer out and in the meantime Pyle’s studio was being altered and he had had to vacate it temporarily. “Then, beside,” he added, “I got interested in the subject and spent more time upon it than, perhaps, I should have done.”

The picture illustrated “The Two Cornets of Monmouth” by A. E. Watrous in Harper's Weekly for September 12, 1891.

A good reproduction of the original painting can be seen in Alice A. Carter’s book on Pyle students Violet Oakley, Elizabeth Shippen Green, and Jessie Willcox Smith, titled The Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love.

Ox, Ox, Darley and Pyle

The great illustrator Felix Octavius Carr Darley (1821-1888) lived and worked in Delaware at the same time that Howard Pyle was coming of age and establishing a career in the same field. In fact, in the 1860s, Pyle and Darley both occupied houses on the Philadelphia Pike: the Pyle family’s “Evergreen(s)”, just north of Wilmington, sat within five miles of Darley’s “Wren’s Nest” in Claymont.

I have yet to find much else connecting them, however, apart from Pyle’s childhood fondness for “Darley’s outline drawings to Washington Irving’s stories” and some other scraps.

But here’s something: take a look at Pyle’s “Bringing the powder to Bunker Hill” engraved by John Tinkey for “The Gunpowder for Bunker Hill” by Ballard Smith (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, July 1886).

“Bringing the powder to Bunker Hill” by Howard Pyle (1886)

And now compare it to “Margaret annoyed by her Brother” engraved by Konrad Huber from Compositions in Outline by Felix O. C. Darley from Judd’s Margaret (New York: Redfield, 1856).

“Margaret annoyed by her Brother” by F. O. C. Darley (1856)

Call it an act of homage or appropriation or plagiarism, but, subtle differences aside, it’s clear that Pyle based his illustration on Darley’s. After all, it was much easier than rustling up a pair of oxen to draw from - though their proportions might have improved had Pyle observed them in person.

Washington is Notified of His Election

On May 19, 1896, Howard Pyle wrote to Woodrow Wilson:

In thinking over the subject for this Sixth Washington Article, I would suggest, by your leave, the following:

1 Thomson, the clerk of Congress, bringing to Washington the official papers notifying him of his election. It seems to me that this is a very good point and I am going on with it now.

Two gentlemen came down from Alexandria along with Thomson and were present during the interview, Thomson addressing the General in a formal speech, to which he replied in as formal a fashion, accepting the honor done him....

Not long after writing (days, maybe, or a week or two), Pyle completed “Thomson, the Clerk of Congress, announcing to Washington, at Mount Vernon, his election to the Presidency,” which illustrated Wilson’s “The First President of the United States” in Harper's New Monthly Magazine for November 1896. When Pyle exhibited the painting in his one-man-shows at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia and the St. Botolph Club in Boston in 1897, he described it in this deliberately archaic-sounding way in the catalogues:

The Clerk of Congress Announcing to Washington his election to the Presidency.

Here the Hero is depicted receiving with that calm Reserve that befitted him so well, the Announcement of his Election to the Chief Magistry of our Nation. The sealed Packet lies upon the Table, while Charles Thomson, Esq., addresses the great Man in Terms of respectful Congratulation. The other Figures represent two Gentlemen of quality who accompanied Mr. Thomson from Alexandria upon his grateful Mission.

But here’s how Wilson described the scene:

...on the 7th [of April, 1789] Charles Thomson, the faithful and sedulous gentleman who had been clerk of every congress since that first one in the old colonial days fifteen years ago, got away on his long ride to Mount Vernon to notify Washington of his election. Affairs waited upon the issue of his errand. Washington had for long known what was coming, and was ready and resolute, as of old. There had been no formal nominations for the presidency, and the votes of the electors had lain under seal till the new Congress met and found a quorum; but it was an open secret who had been chosen President, and Washington had made up his mind what to do. Mr. Thomson reached Mount Vernon on the 14th, and found Washington ready to obey his summons at once.

The relative brevity of this passage calls to mind Pyle’s comments to Paul Leicester Ford:

...the historic writer has a great advantage over the draughtsman, in that he need not necessarily state the most minute point in his work. If he is uncertain as to any single part, he may slur that and pass on to something else. The illustrator must have everything as perfectly accurate as he can render it, for the picture represents not only the general description, but a description so particular that it may take pages upon pages to fulfill it in literature.

The original painting belongs to the Boston Public Library.

“Washington Firing the First Gun at the Siege of Yorktown”

“Washington Firing the First Gun at the Siege of Yorktown” by Howard Pyle (1898)

Such nicely abstract grouping by Howard Pyle here. But “Washington Firing the First Gun at the Siege of Yorktown” - the eleventh in his celebrated series illustrating Henry Cabot Lodge’s “The Story of the Revolution” - is not very well known these days. Pyle most likely painted this at Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1898 and it appeared in Scribner's Magazine that November. Subsequently, I assume, the full-color oil on canvas (about 36 x 24") was trundled around the country as a part of Scribner’s traveling “Revolutionary Pictures” exhibition, and perhaps it was sold somewhere along the way, since the original has yet to turn up.

“Washington in the Garden at Mount Vernon”

“Washington in the Garden at Mount Vernon” by Howard Pyle (1896)

What was on the mind of Howard Pyle - then in the midst of illustrating Woodrow Wilson’s biography of George Washington - 115 years ago today?

...I would represent Washington in his rural life at Mount Vernon. I am informed that the box-walk at Mount Vernon is now very much as it was in Washington’s day. It is very picturesque, and it would be interesting to place Washington in it as a setting.

Perhaps a good arrangement of this idea would be in the visit of Lafayette to Mount Vernon. I would represent Washington as directing the old negro gardener in the setting out of some shrub or small tree, and Lafayette standing at a little distance looking on with a certain remote dignity, Mrs Washington, perhaps, standing with him. In this way we might not only represent the way Washington was sought after in his retirement by great folk, such as Lafayette, but also indicate the idea of his Cincinnatus character....

So Pyle wrote to Wilson on March 27, 1896. As you can see, he altered his concept by leaving Lafayette and Martha Washington out of the painting, which he completed sometime in April. The reproduction above comes from “First in Peace” by Woodrow Wilson (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, September 1896). When Pyle exhibited the painting the following year, he described it in the catalogues in this old-fashioned way:

Here we behold the great Soldier dwelling, Cincinnatus-like, amid those humble and bucolic Joys he held so dear, and to which he was so glad to return after the distracting Clamor of War. Of the Gardener to whom Washington is talking, the ingenious Professor Wilson says, “He agreed with Philip Barter that if he would serve him faithfully as gardener and keep sober at all other times, he would allow him four dollars at Christmas with which to be drunk four days and four nights, etc.”

The original 21 x 15" oil on board - painted in part color - belongs to the Boston Public Library.

And here is the garden from a different point of view, as seen in a turn-of-the-century postcard...

UPDATED June 1, 2011: Alas, Pyle’s low, snaking boxwoods are incorrect (though, in his defense, he was going on the limited information available to him at that time). The History Blog points out in a new post that Washington’s garden was 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.