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.

Study for “Life in an Old Dutch Town”

Study for “Life in an Old Dutch Town” by Howard Pyle (1910)

Howard Pyle’s 16.5 x 71" oil on canvas study for his mural “Life in an Old Dutch Town” (also known as “The First Settlement on Manhattan Island”) will be sold by Sloans & Kenyon Auctioneers and Appraisers in Bethesda, Maryland, this Sunday, September 20, 2015.

The finished mural was one of three Pyle painted for the Freeholders’ Room in the Hudson County Court House in Jersey City, New Jersey. (See this post for more information.)

Documentation on the murals is sorely lacking, but Pyle seems to have received the commission in February 1910; he then visited the courthouse in late March (no doubt to get a sense of the room and the lighting, and to take precise measurements of the spaces his murals would occupy), and he probably prepared and submitted studies for approval sometime that spring. His fee was reported to have been $15,000 for all three pictures, which would - ideally - be in place before the courthouse opened that fall.

Because the murals were longer than Pyle’s own Wilmington studio was wide, he commandeered two of the student studios next door, removed the wall between them, and - assisted to a large degree by Frank Schoonover and Stanley Arthurs - set to work painting the first mural at the end of May 1910.

“Peter Stuyvesant and the English Fleet” took up all of June and “Hendryk Hudson and the Half-Moon”, begun the first week of July, was completed in mid-August. Then, before beginning “Life in an Old Dutch Town”, Pyle seems to have spent two weeks either fine-tuning his study, or maybe even redoing it from scratch: a 1977 article in The Jersey Journal made the so far uncorroborated claim that Pyle “originally started to paint the interior of a Dutch inn taproom, using as a model the Bergen Room of the swank Union League Club in Downtown Jersey City” - but then changed his mind. Either way, as Pyle said to Arthurs and Schoonover in a letter of August 30, 1910, “The last picture that you will work upon is progressing, and will be ready for you on Thursday or Friday next [i.e. September 1st or 2nd].” And, indeed, on the 2nd, they “squared” (or gridded out) the canvas - some 7 feet high and 33 feet wide - and began transferring the image in charcoal from (no doubt) a similarly “squared” photo of Pyle’s study. Painting proper began on Monday, September 5th.

Arthurs, Pyle, and Schoonover, September 21, 1910 (Paul Strayer, photographer)

According to Schoonover’s daybook, the mural was finished - in a mere three weeks - on September 26th and it was packed for shipment on the 28th. It’s likely that on the 26th, 27th, or 28th Pyle had Joseph Pearce of Philadelphia come down to photograph the mural (in two exposures because of its extreme breadth) in the studio, where the lighting would have been brighter and more even than in the dim and shadowy Freeholders’ Room. Pearce’s photos (below) come from Cortlandt Schoonover’s Frank Schoonover: Illustrator of the North American Frontier (Watson-Guptill, 1976): the missing middle portion was cropped in the book; the other blank areas were left unpainted to accommodate brackets and the doorway.

“Life in an Old Dutch Town” mural (Joseph Pearce, photographer)

But after installing “Life in an Old Dutch Town” in Jersey City in early October 1910, Pyle saw a major flaw in his scheme: the brick buildings were acting as visual roadblocks, interrupting the flow from one mural to the next. He must have then reworked the study to solve the problem and then used it once more as a guide in reworking the mural.

Study for “Life in an Old Dutch Town” (Architectural League of New York catalogue, 1911)

And so, what Pyle probably had anticipated to be a day or two of “touching up” turned into over a week of extensive, on-site repainting: replacing the seated folks and the buildings with water, sky, and a horizon line which more pleasingly linked the three murals together. (He also removed baskets from the woman to the right of the young couple and from the woman to the right of the center of the picture.) The mural was finished for good on October 13th or so - more than three weeks after the courthouse had officially opened.

Pyle copyrighted the mural on October 15, 1910, but it isn’t clear if he submitted Pearce’s photo(s) - with the buildings - or a photo of the reworked study. In the Library of Congress’ Catalogue of Copyright Entries it is described (likely by Pyle himself) as “Dutch of New Amsterdam. Street scene, number of people, of time of 1650, coming and going” - which doesn’t really help. It’s possible, too, that the reworked study was photographed before Pyle finished the mural, because the trees on the far right of the study are missing in the mural.

Be it chicken or egg, the study was photographed sometime within the next three months and reproduced in the catalogue of the 26th Annual Exhibition of the Architectural League of New York (January 29-February 18, 1911).

Freeholders’ Room, Hudson County Court House

Decades later, when the courthouse faced demolition, the above photo of the Freeholders’ Room was taken which shows extensive water damage in the center of “Life in an Old Dutch Town”. But the building was saved and the murals were restored in the late 1970s - as seen in this blurry, cropped color photo from the book Heroes in the Fight for Beauty: The Muralists of the Hudson County Court House by Cynthia H. Sanford (Jersey City Museum, 1986) - coupled for comparison with Pearce’s photos.

“Life in an Old Dutch Town” mural before being reworked, 1910 (top); after restoration, c.1986 (bottom)

Since then, the murals may have been restored or cleaned: a photo taken just a few years ago by Leon Yost, shows that “ghosts” of the painted-out brick wall and basket have re-emerged.

“Life in an Old Dutch Town” detail (Leon Yost, photographer)

Now back to the study.

Six weeks after finishing the Hudson County Court House commission, Pyle sailed to Italy, never to return. The study, meanwhile - which, apart from the mural itself, is the last known Colonial scene Pyle ever painted - probably came back from the 1911 Architectural League show and sat in his studio or house for a time, and eventually it wound up with his second youngest child, Godfrey (1895-1959), who in turn, sold it to Francis and Laura (Bryn) Winslow of Chevy Chase, Maryland, whose family has held onto it until now. One grandson described its history this way:

My grandparents were friends of Howard Pyle’s son “Goff” Pyle (presumably that means Godfrey) because they used to go bird hunting together in Delaware in the 1930s and 1940s. In the mid-1940s, my grandparents noticed a rolled-up painting beside the couch in Goff Pyle’s house, asked about it, and bought it. They brought it home, framed it, hung it over the fireplace.

The study probably hadn’t been rolled up or reframed, after all, because the simple oak frame seen in the 1911 catalogue looks to be the same one in this 1949 photo.

Study for “Life in an Old Dutch Town” (1949)

However, as the later photo shows, sometime after being photographed for the 1911 catalogue, about 1.5 inches were cropped from the bottom of the study. Pyle himself may have done this so that it more closely resembled the finished mural - but if that had been his object, why didn’t he paint out the trees on the right of the study as he had done on the mural?

Study for “Life in an Old Dutch Town” 1910-11 photo (top); 2015 photo (bottom)

Confounding matters, the recent color photograph of the study (courtesy of Sloans & Kenyon) shows a few more differences from the 1911 catalogue photo (shown together, above): the trees on the far right, although present, are changed, and a small patch of sky between the young couple (also seen in both photos of the mural) has reappeared. Also, the absence of the windmill’s blades in the center of the picture - and the presence of the small triangle of dark blue water on the far right - may indicate that parts of the study were painted over by Pyle after the 1911 catalogue photo was taken, or by someone else after Pyle’s death. And, as seen in Mr. Yost’s photo of the mural, parts of the brick wall and one of the baskets have re-emerged in the study, perhaps because of fugitive pigments or too rigorous a cleaning.

Even so, Pyle’s study is particularly striking and is stronger both conceptually and compositionally than its enormous counterpart. The latter, of course, was hastily painted - and hastily repainted - and although Pyle knew parts of it had to be cut away for the brackets and doorway, he seems not to have taken this into account when arranging his composition: why, for example, would he crop that pair of women at the knees? The mural was also not the work of Pyle alone: as with the other two, Schoonover and Arthurs had painted much of the canvas. N. C. Wyeth had a point when, in referring to “Peter Stuyvesant and the English Fleet”, he complained:

...Schoonover and Arthurs are painting the decoration for him to considerable extent. Now this is permissible providing they carry the work only through the preliminary stages, and then the master, in seclusion with his whole soul, waves his magic wand and lifts the mass of rudimentary paint and masses into living, virile or personal expressions.

But Pyle - chasing an almost impossible deadline - just didn’t have the time to do that. The study, however, does him great credit - and here’s hoping it finds a good home.

“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 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.

“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.

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 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.)

Abbey and Pyle Entangled

Entangled - Drawn by E. A. Abbey, from a Sketch by H. Pyle (Harper’s Weekly, January 19, 1878)

In his memoir, A World Worth While: A Record of “Auld Acquaintance”, illustrator W. A. Rogers said:

In looking over an old file of Harper’s Weekly the other day I came across a picture of Colonial life under which was printed, “Drawn by E. A. Abbey from a sketch by Howard Pyle.” That was before Pyle’s wings were strong enough to enable him to fly alone. It was in the days when most of the work was drawn on wood, and Pyle never was successful in working on the block.

“Entangled” is the picture Rogers mentions. “This was redrawn by Abbey from my original drawing,” Pyle noted in his scrapbook. “My drawing was made before I left Wilmington and was accepted as an ‘idea’. I got, I think, twenty dollars for it.” After Edwin Austin Abbey tightened it up, Victor Bernstrom engraved it for the January 19, 1878, issue of Harper’s Weekly. An accompanying paragraph explained:

The costumes and accessories in our engraving on page 52 show that the artist designed to represent a scene in an American country house of the last century; but the story suggested suits all times and countries. The tell-tale chairs placed cozily side by side, the evident embarrassment of the young gentleman, in spite of his effort to look cool and unconcerned, and as if he had been leaning all the morning against the mantel-piece, are quite perceptible to the keen glance of the maiden’s father as he comes into the room. Likely enough he is a loyalist, while the suitor for his daughter’s heart and hand may be the son of a patriot. Out of this hint every reader may weave a romance for himself.

“Entangled” was published just when Pyle’s early career was turning a corner, when publishers - and fellow illustrators, like Abbey - were beginning to take him seriously.

And in looking at this picture again, I feel more and more convinced that in redrawing Pyle’s picture, Abbey used Pyle himself as the model for “the young gentleman.” There’s something about the height and body language and the shape of head and brow, the texture of the hair, the sideburns, the way the hands are tucked in the pockets... Not many photographs of a twenty-something Pyle have turned up, but take a look at these two - maybe you’ll see what I mean.

Photograph of Howard Pyle, c.1875

Photograph of Howard Pyle, c.1880-83

“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.

A Howard Pyle Tiffany Window

In 1893, Howard Pyle designed a stained-glass window which was to be fabricated by the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company.

“Designed” might not be the precise word: Pyle didn’t so much design the window as paint a picture that was, in essence, “translated” by Tiffany’s stained-glass artisans.

The window was destined for - and, presumably, commissioned by - the Colonial Club of New York, which had moved into a handsome new building on Broadway and 72nd Street the previous year. The subject was Anthony Van Corlaer, and the work has generally been known by the title “Antony Van Corlear [sic], the Trumpeter of New Amsterdam”. Then again, it could be argued that the “official” title is that which Pyle lettered on the work itself:

ANTONIVS VAN CORLEARVS TVBIC
EN PRO NOVELLO AMSTERDAMO

(That title might not be too reliable, however: “My Latin is very loose,” Pyle later wrote (in reference to a mistake in the first printing of his Story of King Arthur), “and I am afraid that I always depend too much on the text reader to help me with that - as well as with my dreadful spelling.”)

At any rate, Pyle seems to have been proud of his painting: on March 18, 1893 he welcomed invited guests to his Wilmington studio to take a look at it before it was shipped off. It was subsequently shown at the Tiffany studios, 333 Fourth Avenue, New York, February 25-26, 1897, and at the First Annual Exhibition of the Pittsburgh Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, May 2-31, 1898.

But the painting has since gone missing. We can take a look at it, however, courtesy of an article on “Window Making as an Art” by William H. Thomas in The Munsey Magazine for December 1901.

Granted, it’s in black and white, but at least we can see the general scheme - not to mention a great many of the painterly details that were “lost in translation” - perhaps because they were deemed unnecessary or impossible to replicate in glass. (Note, for instance, Pyle’s rendering of the boots.)

The window was completed and installed in a Colonial Club stairway sometime that year or the next. The American Architect and Building News for December 29, 1894 described it thus:

At the head of the first flight is a Tiffany window, quite expressive of the Club - Antony Van Corlear sits jovial, surrounded by laughing maidens, who fill his glass and flatter his bachelor vanity, while in the tablets on either side we read the tale, as set forth in the “Knickerbocker’s History”:

“But it was a moving sight
To see ye buxom lasses;
How they hung about ye Doughty
Antony Van Corlear;
For he was a jolly rosy-faced
Lusty bachelor
Fond of his joke and withal
A desperate rogue among ye women!”

A humorous and pleasing thing to greet one on entering the Club!

But in 1903 the clubhouse went into foreclosure and over the next century the building underwent a series of modifications and renovations before ultimately being demolished in 2007.

Fortunately, the window weathered these storms: somewhere along the line it was removed and on March 30, 1984 it was auctioned by Christie’s in New York and purchased by the Delaware Art Museum. It measures 65.5 x 39.5 inches, and Pyle’s painting most likely is - or was - of similar dimensions. Maybe it weathered some storms, too, and will show up one day.

“Can’t you see ’em twicet?”

“Macarooned” “Marooned” by Howard Pyle (1909)

The Delaware Art Museum’s lovely, landmark show, Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered, closes today. Fortunately, it will reappear this June at the Norman Rockwell Museum.

One hundred years ago this month, in March 1912, an exhibition featuring many of the same pictures was mounted by The Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, which had been formed in direct response to Pyle’s death the previous November. That show, held in the ballroom of the Hotel du Pont on Market Street, stayed up for only a couple of days, but it was a tremendous hit. “GREAT CROWDS VIEW PICTURES,” said one newspaper. “About 10,000 Saw the Howard Pyle Art Collection During Yesterday. MANY COULD NOT GET IN.”

An article about the show later appeared in The Outlook for June 1, 1912. Although unsigned, rumor has it that Pyle’s student Ethel Pennewill Brown was the author (a.k.a. “The Spectator”). And I'm going to quote it in full, here, since it so well describes the universal enthusiasm that Pyle’s work could generate - and can still generate, when given the chance.

*****************

THE SPECTATOR

Both entrance halls of the big office building, running in from two streets, were jammed with people - every kind of people, from white-haired men to infants in arms. The three elevators were plying as fast as they could to the eleventh floor, but the crowd thronged in far too fast for them to handle. “And it’s only beginning,” said the attendant in charge. “You ought to have seen them yesterday evening at about nine o’clock! It's only a quarter of eight now, and it’ll get worse from now on.” The Spectator was glad he had arrived early. Also, he was glad to see that for once a prophet was honored in his own country; for the swift shuttles of the elevators were taking up all Wilmington to look at the collection of pictures by Howard Pyle, the artist who had lived all his life in the busy manufacturing city of the Diamond State.

----

Never was there a better citizen than Howard Pyle, or a better friend. Therefore a group of his friends had organized this exhibit of all the pictures that he had left, that the whole city might see them, and that, if possible, they might be secured as a nucleus for an art gallery for the town. It was thus not an ordinary picture show, but a peculiarly personal and popular one. The Spectator, who counts the remembrance of Howard Pyle’s friendship as one of the privileges of life, met at the very door of the big ball-room on the top floor, where the show was held, others of an intimate circle who were serving as ushers and explaining the pictures to those who asked for information. “I’ve been taking small boys around all day,” one woman said, smiling, “and it’s been such fun! They want to know all about! ‘The Taking of Cartagena,’ and ‘The Flying Dutchman,’ and ‘The Battle of Germantown,’ and ‘Bunker Hill,’ and ‘The Salem Wolf,’ and ‘The Triumph of War,’ and ‘Thomas Jefferson.’ History isn’t my strong point, and several of them have corrected me. Not one boy has been troublesome or mischievous, and yet some of them have been regular little street boys - colored ones, too, among them. I shall never again think that art doesn’t interest the masses. Why,” to a nine-year-old, ragged and tousled, who came marching in with two younger boys tagging on to him, “haven’t you been here to-day already?”

----

“Yes, lady,” said the boy, shyly. “But I'd like to see ’em again, and here’s Joe hasn’t seen ’em yet, nor his brother. Can't you see ’em twicet?”

“Of course you can,” said the usher. “Which one do you like the best, out of them all?”

The urchin hesitated not a second. “That feller on the ship in the storm,” he said, pointing to the Flying Dutchman staggering on the slanting, streaming, gale-swept deck. The crowd was already three deep before it, but the little fellows wormed their way in and stood hand in hand gazing at the canvas. “I don’t suppose they have ever had a chance to see a good painting before in their lives,” said the usher. “That’s the interesting thing - to see the people here that one would never think would care for pictures or come. But they do come; there were six thousand here yesterday, and we didn’t expect five hundred! We’ve had four infants in arms, and three pet dogs, and several people on crutches, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some one come in on a stretcher rather than miss it!”

----

And still they came. A solid wave flowed into the wide door of the high-arched ball-room, so that soon the committee had to stand there and direct the people to “Keep to the left, and move on all the time, please.” White-haired men and women, young couples bringing the baby, high school girls and boys, fashionably dressed women, laboring men, city officials, Poles, Italians, Negroes, Russian Jews, sisters of charity, deaconesses, leading clergymen, shopgirls, saloon and sporting men, art students, and boys, and more boys - a whole community, in fact, was surging up from the street to see the work of a beloved citizen as well as a famous artist. It was what America’s greatest illustrator would have loved to see - the human impulse, the response of the people to an art that reached them. For they did not glance at the pictures and pass on. They did not stand, as at the usual cultivated “private view,” with their backs to the pictures and talk to each other. They moved along slowly, so slowly that they had to be fairly torn away from picture after picture by the hovering committee. The crowded line, five and six deep, all around the spacious hall wanted to see every picture, and stay a while before this and that especially appealing one.

----

It was a fine group of canvases - full of color and fire and imagination. Howard Pyle’s Quaker blood made him a mystic, and also, by a paradox, sent him headlong on the trail of adventure and romance. His last picture - brought back from Florence unfinished and unsigned - was here: a heaving sea of iridescent blue and green, a cold moon, and slippery rocks, from which a mermaid siren, glittering, mysterious, alluring, winding her white arms about the young fisher-lad, was dragging him down, down, into the deadly depths below the white lacing foam. Across the room, in all the glory of a mellow sunset, the marooned pirate, crouched on the island sands, his head sunk on his hands, sat desolate while the screaming sea-birds wheeled overhead. Revolutionary scenes, mediaeval legends, colonial lovers and witches and sailors, bearded pirates dividing the spoils of cities or grappling treasure galleons, drew the eye and stirred the imagination. Exquisite black-and-white filled panel after panel, bold, minute, fascinating to linger over. The variety, the vigor, and the charm of the work were amazing.

----

“We didn’t have a catalogue, or put a rope railing in, because it was only for two days, and we never dreamed the whole town would come,” explained one of the committee. “We thought a few hundred, especially interested, would come and see what was here, and that a sentiment could be created for buying the collection. There are ninety-nine oils here, and then the black-and-whites and a few water-colors. Outside of the large mural paintings done for various public buildings in other States, these fairly represent the artist’s best work, and they are all in the market. If the little Italian towns of long ago could hold on to the pictures of their local artists, and so come to have galleries that travelers visit in thousands every year, there is no reason why American towns to-day should not begin to do the same thing. We are trying for a new free library building for Wilmington, and we want an art gallery in connection with it, with these for a nucleus. This crowd looks as if public sentiment will be running strong our way.”

----

It did indeed look so. The ushers at the door were fairly overwhelmed, and at last the order was given for the elevators to cease running. It was reported from below that the crowd was standing out in the street. The crush was now pressing the people fairly against the pictures, so it seemed better to let them wait in the street than come up and endanger the canvases. “Oh, dear, look at that woman’s hat-pin!” cried a watchful usher. “Won’t you please, Mr. Brown, go over there and call to her either to take out her hat-pin or keep her head slanted away from the canvas?” Mr. Brown obligingly pushed over, and the colored girl, whose enormous hat was pierced by a steel skewer with some six projecting inches of bare steel, giggled and threw her head far on the required slant, thereby knocking a meek and inoffensive man out of his place, but saving the pictures.

----

“We had the name, on a typewritten slip, pasted on the frame of each picture,” the Spectator was told. “But the crowd got so close to read the names that, we were afraid some of the near-sighted people would injure the canvas, and we took them all off. So the public can call them what they please. That wonderful one of the pirate abandoned on the island of the Spanish Main - ‘Marooned’ - is a great favorite. But many have called it ‘Macarooned,’ and enjoyed it just as much. Several men have come up and asked, ‘Which is the most expensive picture, please?’ One girl wanted to know ‘if the artist had a right to sign a picture with ships in it and call it an original picture, when he had the ships right there to draw from?’ Half a dozen school-children are going to write compositions about their favorite pictures. It seems to me that I never have thought of art as a thing that is alive and means something to all kinds of people, as I have these two days.”

----

The Spectator felt that way that night, too. He stayed to the end - until the lights were turned low so as to get the people to leave. They tramped off to the descending elevators - tired-looking men and women with another day’s work ahead of them, sleepy boys who still wanted to take another look at “Bunker Hill,” or “Thomas Jefferson,” or “The Mermaid,” or “The Pilgrimage of Truth,” or “The Burning Galleon,” or “The Taking of Cartagena.” Ten thousand of them had seen the pictures that day, in addition to the six thousand the day before - about one-fifth of the entire population, young and old. And yet some people think there is no future for American art! The Spectator is sure, after seeing that demonstration, that Wilmington will get its art gallery, and that the pictures of Howard Pyle will be a proud and prized community possession for all time in the old city where the Quaker artist was so beloved a citizen.

“Mr. Leuba”

“Mr. Leuba” by Howard Pyle (1890)
Poor “Mr. Leuba” - he didn’t go far. He appeared in James Lane Allen’s “Flute and Violin” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for December 1890, but when the Howard Pyle-illustrated story came out in book form the following May, he was nowhere to be seen.

Well, not exactly. In one of the other illustrations - “It was a very gay dinner” - which did appear in both the magazine and the book, Mr. Leuba is seated in the background - with almost exactly the same pose and expression as in his “portrait”...

“It was a very gay dinner” by Howard Pyle (1890)

 The scan of “Mr. Leuba” was made from Pyle’s original ink on bristol board - 2 3/8 x 2 1/2" on a 7 1/4 x 8 15/16" sheet - and it’s possible to see some pencil marks where he loosely sketched in his drawing and how he scratched out the highlights in Leuba’s eyes.

“I think it a very capital story and am sure it will be a pleasant one to illustrate,” Pyle had said after reading the manuscript. But he ran into trouble. “Slight as the drawings are, I have had very ill-luck with them, having done most of them over once or twice, if not more times,” he wrote on June 7, 1890. “I would like to make the ultimate result as satisfactory as possible.”

The nervous pen-work is typical of Pyle’s transitional period, when he broke away from the slower, controlled style of The Wonder Clock (1887) and Otto of the Silver Hand (1888) and adopted the more scratchy method seen in The One Hoss Shay (1891).

“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.

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.

“Why am I so blue?”

“All eyes were turned to Abraham Davenport...” by Howard Pyle

It’s always interesting - interesting to me, at least - to see great minds succumb to rounds of anxiety and self-doubt. On July 17, 1883, Howard Pyle wrote to his wife, Anne, who was down at her family’s cottage in Rehoboth, Delaware with their 13-month-old son, Sellers:

I sit here this evening a right up and down blue man. Why am I so blue? That I can’t tell thee; thee knows how I get such spells upon me; one of them is upon me now. I have had a day of enforced - I might almost say - idleness through the failure of Harpers to send the Higginson MS. that they must forward. Beside this, my drawing for Butler (the Philadelphia publisher) has not turned out what I could have desired. It is too good to do over again and yet is almost too bad to send away. I want to get it out of the house for I hate the sight of it when I come into the studio. I don’t know whether it is the hot weather or whether it is thy being away that upsets me, or whether I am going backward in my work, but certainly it seems to me that I do not draw so well now as I did three months ago. I really am very much inclined to write to Mr. [Charles] Parsons [head of Harper & Brothers’ art department] and ask him to send me away somewhere on a trip so that I can get away from the jog-trot drudgery of manufacturing pictures for two or three weeks. If I have a change, perhaps I can tackle my work again with more vim and go when I come back to it again.

Pyle may well have been in a sort of post-partum depression at this point: he had recently finished writing and illustrating his Gesamtkunstwerk, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood - which would come out that fall - and he seems to have been casting about for something equally absorbing. He had just begun writing verses which would later be collected in Pepper & Salt and was doing - or trying to do - his usual bread-and-butter work.

The “Higginson MS.” was Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s manuscript for either “The Dawning of Independence” or “The Birth of a Nation” or “Our Country’s Cradle” - articles which Pyle ultimately illustrated for Harper’s Monthly.

And his “drawing for Butler” is, perhaps, the illustration shown here for Monroe's New Fifth Reader (Philadelphia: E. H. Butler & Co., 1884), which somehow missed inclusion in the 1921 bibliography of Pyle’s works (I’m not yet entirely sure if this is the one Pyle meant, though: I need to keep hunting).

Pyle’s Franklin Street studio, meanwhile, was in the process of being built, hence his statement, “I want to get it out of the house,” since between 1881 and 1883 his workspace was located in his - actually, his mother-in-law’s - home at 207 Washington Street in Wilmington.

Still blue, Pyle wrote to Anne the following day: “Bad luck today. No MS. from Harpers.… Rubbed off from my picture that which I did yesterday, and think it looks better. I shall send it away tomorrow without touching it any more - I hope.”

Pyle’s Post-Publication Changes, Part 2

Howard Pyle was not above reworking a picture after publication. “The Burial of Braddock” is one example: after it appeared in Harper’s Monthly - and after Paul Leicester Ford pointed out an error in it - Pyle turned a fancy, but historically innaccurate coffin into a crude box made of scrap wood. He did this right before shipping it to its new home at the Boston Public Library where it would, in his words, “go upon record.”

Another post-publication change can be seen in his 1889 work, "My hatred of him seemed suddenly to have taken to itself wings," for Harold Frederic’s novel In the Valley. Here’s how it looked in Scribner's Magazine for July 1890, engraved by Henry W. Peckwell:

"My hatred of him seemed suddenly to have taken to itself wings" (magazine version)

Now compare it to the halftone plate that was used in the book edition of the novel. (Granted, this is really just to show how the original picture differs from engraver Peckwell’s interpretation.)

"My hatred of him seemed suddenly to have taken to itself wings" (book version)

Fast-forward to 1892: Frank Nelson Doubleday - then a rising star at Charles Scribner’s Sons, but who hadn’t yet struck out on his own - was collecting material for a high-end, oversized “book” in portfolio form called American Illustrators. In early April, Doubleday wrote to Pyle about the project and asked him to choose one of his illustrations to be featured among the 15 finely-printed plates. Without hesitation, Pyle picked "My hatred of him seemed suddenly to have taken to itself wings" since it was “perhaps, my best work for Scribners in black and white.” Doubleday then tracked the original to Germany (I’m not sure why it was there) and had it shipped to Pyle.

But on July 16, 1892, just after receiving the picture, Pyle asked Doubleday, “if you would be willing for me to alter the drawing a little. I find, looking at it with new eyes, that the canoe is somewhat out of proportion and just a little out of drawing and I should like to make it as perfect as possible.” Doubleday acquiesced and Pyle had at it. The result can be seen here, in the photogravure plate as published in American Illustrators that October:

“The Wounded Enemy” (American Illustrators version)

Not only did Pyle reconstruct the ends of the canoe, he fiddled with the tall trees in front of the moon, softened the waterline, and toned down the reflections in the water. All of it to good, almost Dewing-esque effect. The title, too, was changed to the much less wordy “The Wounded Enemy.”

I don’t know if the original painting ever made its way back to Germany, but Scribner’s loaned it to the Trans-Mississippi and International Exhibition in Omaha, Nebraska in 1898, and in May 1913 they sold it for $150 (double, incidentally, what they had paid Pyle for it 24 or 25 years earlier) to collector William Bradhurst Osgood Field (1870-1949), and now it belongs to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. And exactly two years ago today, Joyce K. Schiller’s short essay on the picture was posted here.

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.