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.

Testimonials to Howard Pyle

In honor of Howard Pyle’s 161st birthday, here are a few kind words from some of his friends and admirers:

“You write about a beautiful sheet in the Graphic by Howard Pyle. If you mean a composition that reminds one of Terborch or Nicolaas Keyzer - ‘Penn and the Colonists’ - yes, I was struck by it too, so much so that I have ordered the issue. Yes, it is a damned fine thing.” (Vincent Van Gogh to Anthon Ridder van Rappard, c.May 9, 1883)

“It was not so much the actual things he taught us as contact with his personality that really counted. Somehow after a talk with him you felt inspired to go out and do great things, and wondered afterwards by what magic he did it” (Maxfield Parrish to Richard Wayne Lykes, March 28, 1945)

“I haven’t before had a chance to express to you my very heart felt admiration for your noble series of illustrations for my ‘Washington.’ They dignify and illuminate the work in every way.” (Woodrow Wilson to Howard Pyle, October 27, 1896)

“The virility and poetry and the beauty of it are remarkable” (Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Howard Pyle, June 20, 1902)

“It was a great idea, a fortunate idea, to re-write the Round Table Tales, & I am your grateful servant. You are giving them a new charm & grace & beauty; they have gained, not lost, under your hand. They were never so finely told in prose before. And then the pictures - one can never tire of examining them & studying them. Long ago you made the best Robin Hood that was ever written, & your Morté d’Arthur is going to be another masterpiece. It was a great idea; I am glad it was born to you.” (Samuel L. Clemens to Howard Pyle, January 1, 1903)

“Will Mr. Howard Pyle accept through me the love of seven big and little children to whom he taught the beauty of language and of line, and to whom, in a desert place, he sent the precious message of Romance.” (Willa Cather inscription to Howard Pyle in The Troll Garden, April 26, 1906)

“Eleven and twelve years old we were, most of us, but I’ll wager no one of us has forgotten him, no one of us but has looked back on those wintry afternoons in the pleasant fire-lighted studio many times, realizing how vital a part of our background, literary and artistic, it has become. I was at boarding school when the news of his death in Florence reached me, and I knew then I had lost a very real friend.” (Virginia Kirkus in The Horn Book Magazine, November 1929)

“One of the very best men I know anywhere, one of the pleasantest companions, stanchest friends, and best citizens, is Mr. Howard Pyle, the artist.” (Theodore Roosevelt to Gifford Pinchot, September 9, 1907)

“I think that pirate duel is the most terrific thing I ever saw. I had almost all the sensations I have enjoyed at a prize fight. Oh if I were only a pluto I’d have that in the middle of my shack and when I wanted to be lifted out of the dreary run of existence I would take a look.” (Frederic Remington to Howard Pyle, November 13, 1908)

“There are many in this world who radiate the feeling of love and earnestness of purpose, but who have not the faculty or power to impart the rudiments of accomplishment. There is nothing in this world to inspire the integrity of youth like the combined strength of spirituality and practical headway. It gives the young student a definite clew, as it were, to the usefulness of being upright and earnest. Howard Pyle abounded in this combined power, and lavished it upon all who were serious.” (N. C. Wyeth in The Christian Science Monitor. November 13, 1912)

“I myself have always wondered that more people were not affected by Mr. Pyle’s piercing fineness of spiritual vision.... I don’t know any other American who had his extraordinary combination of fine qualities.” (Dorothy Canfield Fisher to Charles David Abbott, May 20, 1925)

“The battle picture at St. Paul is absolutely one of the most remarkable pictures of modern times.... You, of course, know of Mr. Pyle’s work through his illustrations, but unless you know the man personally you cannot realize what a perfectly charming fellow he is and how very beautiful and strong his paintings. He seems to cover a very wide range of subjects with absolute surety, and while preserving historic detail he never loses vitality and intense personal quality, while his sense of the decorative and the picturesque is most remarkable.” (Cass Gilbert to Ralph Adams Cram, December 31, 1907)

“It is quite unnecessary for you to talk to me about Howard Pyle, for there is no man in the United States for whom I have a more profound admiration.” (Ralph Adams Cram to Cass Gilbert, January 2, 1908)

“I have never valued a friend more.” (William Dean Howells to Gertrude Brincklé, October 17, 1919)

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)

Pyle on Saint-Gaudens’s Sherman Monument

On May 30, 1903, Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Sherman Monument was unveiled at the southeast corner of Central Park in New York City. Although there’s no known evidence that Howard Pyle was present at the ceremony, we do know that he saw it in place within the next few days. Pyle, who delivered an address at Yale University’s School of Fine Arts in New Haven, Connecticut, on June 1, and passed through Manhattan on the way there and back, wrote to Saint-Gaudens on June 4:

I have just returned from New York and I feel that I want to tell you how beautiful I think your Sherman Memorial Statue to be.

It impresses me, as your work always does, as being not only beautiful but great, and I am sure that it is not prejudice upon my part but a matter of calm judgment that leads me to feel that you are easily the leading sculptor in the world today -

I could say more - but will not do so.

Saint-Gaudens’s reply is lost, but Pyle’s letter seems to have reminded him to send a copy of his bronze Robert Louis Stevenson medallion, which he’d promised to give Pyle a year earlier - after Pyle had sent Saint-Gaudens his pen-and-ink drawing “The Song of Peace”. Pyle received it on July 15, 1903, and apparently it’s still owned by his descendants.

Taking Pyle for Granted?

It seems strange to me that all these years people have apparently taken Howard Pyle for granted, and yet scarcely written a word about him as one of the biggest men of his calibre, or of any calibre, that we have in this country.

 So said Homer Saint-Gaudens, son of the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, on June 1, 1911. He was addressing Robert Underwood Johnson, then editor of The Century Magazine. “So I thought that I would start on a pilgrimage to find whether or no some magazine would not care for an article upon him by me, and I am beginning with you,” Saint-Gaudens added.

Johnson didn’t take the bait. Nor - as far as I can tell - did any other editor. Granted, Pyle wasn’t particularly newsworthy at that time, but I wonder if there wasn’t a subtle prejudice against him. Sometimes I think he wasn’t European enough for America - or at least for the American taste-makers.

Howard Pyle on Augustus Saint-Gaudens

As early as 1880, Augustus Saint-Gaudens sought the 27-year-old Howard Pyle’s advice on the proper costume for his statue of Robert Richard Randall...

Years later, in a letter of February 23, 1898, to Saint-Gaudens’ wife, Augusta, Pyle said:

Indeed, my dear madam, you greatly magnify my work by comparing it as you do with that of Mr Saint Gaudens. I do - I believe - the best that I am able, but I am very conscious that my best falls far, far short of his.

But I’ve always felt that that the Saimt-Gaudens’ work was, in many ways, the three-dimensional embodiment of Pyle’s. Apart from attention to historical details, etc., they share a certain “solidity of form”, for want of a better description.

Slideshow at the Drexel Institute, January 9, 1906

At 4.00 p.m. on Tuesday, January 9, 1906, Howard Pyle delivered a lecture illustrated with steriopticon slides titled “The True Spirit of Art” at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia. The next day, the Philadelphia Inquirer noted:

HOWARD PYLE GIVES LECTURE

That the true spirit of art is the work of the imagination and soul of the artist, which expresses his inner thought clearly and forcefully, even though the work may not be technically correct, was the theory advanced yesterday afternoon by Howard Pyle, the well-known artist, in the Drexel Institute.

And an as yet unidentified newspaper gave a much more detailed report, also on January 10, 1906, which I’ve transcribed in full, below. Although the article names a number of the pictures Pyle featured in his slideshow, I’m having difficulty identifying all of them, so if anyone can present some more viable candidates, please let me know.

HOWARD PYLE TELLS OF THE TRUE IN ART
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HOW A PAINTER MAY REALLY ATTAIN HIS IDEAL
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Work of Famous Men Portrayed in a Lecture Delivered at the Drexel Institute
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Howard Pyle lectured at the Drexel Institute yesterday on “The True in Art.” His chief aim was to show that the ambition of a great artist should be to portray his ideal in as vividly life-like a manner as the barriers to all artistic expression will permit. He cannot express passage of time or increase of age, the speaker said, but he can express emotion.

To illustrate the difference between the art of the past and that of the present, as regards the truest understanding of a picture, was another of Mr. Pyle’s objects. The main difference, he said, lies in the difference of man’s mind, which in the Middle Ages was not creative. To illustrate the speaker’s points stereopticon views were given. Four pictures representative of the art of the past, which were shown, pointed out that in the picture of the Madonna by Botticelli the Virgin is not portrayed as a Jewish maiden, but as an Italian symbolic of the perfection of womanhood. The same is true of Raphael’s Madonna, which portrays the highest form of maternal love, but only as the artist saw it among Italian women.

Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna” is not necessarily THE Madonna Pyle discussed, but she’ll have to do for now.

As with the Raphael, Pyle may have discussed another Madonna than the “Madonna del Magnificat” by Sandro Botticelli.


Mr. Pyle next had thrown on the screen a picture by Chavannes, “The Heavenly Vision,” in which the perspective was very faulty, not because the artist could not draw properly, but because his whole aim and thought had been centered on his dreamlike reflection of the heavenly vision. [I assume this refers to Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ “Vision Antique” - though I suppose it could be “L’Inspiration Chrétienne”]

A similar idea was shown in the pictures by Millet - “Procession of Joseph,” the “Ploughmen” and an effective and wonderful work entitled “Leaving England,” [sic - “The Last of England” by Ford Madox Brown ] on which the artist labored years to bring an acute sense of tragedy to the face.

I assume “The Procession of Joseph” is really “The Flight into Egypt” by Jean François Millet. It represents Joseph carrying the Christ child - with halo aglow - followed by Mary. There is a similar version, where Mary is carrying the baby and is sitting on a donkey led by Joseph, but I believe Pyle would have been more familiar with the version show here.

“The Last of England” by Ford Madox Brown


Millais’s “Ophelia” was another illustration used to show the extent to which the artist went to get just the right touch of a woman floating in the water.

“Ophelia” by John Everett Millais


Then Mr. Pyle spoke of the American school of artists of today. Placing Augustus St. Gaudens at the head of the list, he presented a picture of the head of “Victory” used on the Sherman statue to show that this was St. Gaudens’s conception of glorified American womanhood.

“Head of Victory” by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Pyle had a slide made from a plaster study which the sculptor had given him in 1902. Shown here is a replica of the bronze version.


George De Forest Brush’s power of accepting and digesting a side of American life was shown in a powerful picture of primitive life - “Indians Spearing a Deer.”

“Indians Spearing a Deer” is more likely “The Moose Chase” by George De Forest Brush


The position of Winslow Homer in the artistic world, Mr. Pyle said, was not fully settled, “but that he ranks among the greatest artists today cannot be disputed. His ‘Maine Coast’ is considered one of the finest sea scenes ever painted.”

“Maine Coast” by Winslow Homer

In this way Mr. Pyle tried to illustrate his theme, that to be a great artist the aspirant must not think solely of painting and drawing well - for then he will in time make a beautiful picture, but never a great one. To paint a great picture he must have a huge ideal which he is always trying to express in its most complete form as he sees it in his dreams.

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.