“I have made a very great mistake”

“I have just received the complimentary copies of my last book, ‘Sir Launcelot and His Companions,’” wrote Howard Pyle to Charles Scribner’s Sons on October 26, 1907.

Like many authors and illustrators, Pyle may have leafed through the new volume with a mixture of pride and apprehension. And in this case an embarrassing discovery was in store: “I notice in looking it over that I have made a very great mistake, for the picture on page 200 entitled ‘Sir Gawaine of the Fountain’ should read ‘Sir Ewaine of the Fountain.’”

Ever careful Pyle had not been careful enough. As with most of his children’s books, he had delivered Sir Launcelot and His Companions in fits and starts while juggling other work. To safeguard against errors and inconsistencies, on mailing one batch he had asked the publisher “to send me proofs of these drawings as soon as they are reproduced, for I shall maybe use the same characters in later decorations.”

And yet, although the picture served as a frontispiece to Part V of the book titled “The Story of Sir Ewaine and the Lady of the Fountain,” and three other illustrations of which featured Sir Ewaine, “Sir Gawaine” had slipped past Pyle - not to mention everyone else involved with the production of the book.

“Perhaps before any more copies are printed you will have this changed in New York (where almost anyone could do the lettering) or else send it to me to have the lettering changed,” Pyle continued in his letter of October 26. “It is very curious that this mistake should have happened but, as I say, it is altogether my fault.”

The expense of correcting the plate, however, must have been too much for Scribner’s to consider, and Pyle must have forgotten all about it, because the mis-titled illustration has lived on, reprint after reprint, and has never been called out or corrected.

But as I am “almost anyone [who] could do the lettering” (as well as being in New York), I’ve belatedly honored Pyle’s request, below.

The Story of Siegfried

“The Forging of Balmung” by Howard Pyle (Frank French, engraver)

“Please let me know when you are likely to be in New York again,” wrote E. L. Burlingame, editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, to Howard Pyle on January 12, 1882. “We have a matter of some importance which I think would interest you; at all events I should like to talk it over with you at your first opportunity.”

The “matter” was the illustrations for James Baldwin’s retelling of the Siegfried (or Sigurd) legends. At the time, Pyle - whose interest in Medieval folklore was already well-established - was under an exclusive, one-year contract with Harper & Brothers for his pictures, but as it only extended to periodicals and not to books, he was able to accept the commission.

“The Death of Fafnir” by Howard Pyle (John Parker Davis, engraver)

Four and a half months later, on May 26, 1882, Burlingame updated Baldwin on the book’s progress:

Up to this time the manuscript has been in the hands of the artist, Mr. Howard Pyle, who has been somewhat delayed in making drawings.... The illustrations are now well advanced, however; they are six in number, full-page cuts, and are in our opinion admirably conceived and drawn. Proofs of them will be sent you as they are received from the engravers.

It’s not clear if “the illustrations” referred to Pyle’s black and white gouache paintings or to the wood-engravings thereof, but Pyle definitely delivered his work before June 8, when Burlingame again wrote to Baldwin:

We send you by this post some very rough unmounted photographs of Mr. Howard Pyle’s drawings for Siegfried. These will give you no idea, to be sure, of the great beauty and force of the pictures themselves; but they only convey the grouping and general composition well enough to show you that we have given the work to one of the best artists for such a subject. Mr. Pyle has been cordially interested in it, and in our opinion has done his part in the true spirit of the text.

The Story of Siegfried (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1882)

Handsomely bound, with cover art adapted from Pyle’s “The Forging of Balmung,” The Story of Siegfried was published in October 1882. The illustrations were roundly praised: the Detroit Free Press said that they “deserve special mention for their beauty and fidelity. Nothing better in book illustration has been done this season.” “The interest in the legends will be much enhanced in young eyes by the striking pictures furnished by Howard Pyle,” observed The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Daily Union-Leader of Wilkes-Barre noted that the book “is happily illustrated by Pyle, whose drawings, it is safe to say, have never been surpassed for such a purpose.” And Pyle’s hometown paper Every Evening remarked:

The dear, delightful people of the Nibelungen come before one bodily, and in such a way that one feels thankful to the artist for his creation of them. The illustrations are full of ideality, and without that apparent assumption of oddness that has, in the eyes of some, spoiled Mr. Pyle’s good work. The awakening Brunhild by the kiss of Siegfried, is exquisite. The calm, placid expression of her face, and the wonder that overspreads the knight’s, display a real feeling with the legend, and without which feeling no man should illustrate a book.

“The Awakening of Brunhild” by Howard Pyle (E. Clément, engraver)

What Pyle himself thought of the illustrations is not known, but “The Death of Siegfried” (below) is surely one of the best and most “Pylean” things he made thus far in his 6-year-old career.

In 1885, four of the set were included in the Grolier Club’s Exhibition of Original Designs for Book Illustration, but afterward they - like most of Pyle’s Scribner work - joined the other two at the publisher’s offices on Broadway near Astor Place, and then to Fifth Avenue between 20th and 21st Streets, where Charles Scribner’s Sons relocated in 1894.

“The Trial of Strength” by Howard Pyle (John Karst, engraver)

Over the years, some of Pyle’s originals found their way out of storage - sold or given away piecemeal - but most remained there until 1915, when The Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts acquired some 68 of them - almost all that were left. The six Siegfried illustrations, however, were not included. Why?

“The Quarrel of the Queens” by Howard Pyle (John Karst, engraver)

On July 29, 1908, the New York World reported:

BLAZE IN SCRIBNER’S

—————

Fire Starts in Counting Room and Does $6,000 Damage.

A fire originating on the third floor of Scribner Bros.’ publishing house, Nos. 153, 155 and 157 Fifth avenue, at 5 o’clock this morning caused damage amounting to $6,000. Patrolman Jones saw the reflection of the flames and turned in an alarm.

The firemen broke into the building and found the blaze had gained headway in the counting room on the third floor and worked through to the fourth floor. The origin of the fire is a mystery.

The extent of the “$6,000 damage” is also a mystery, but Scribner’s index-card inventory of artwork (now at the Brandywine River Museum) shows that all six Siegfried pictures and at least one other Pyle oil - not to mention works by his fellow artists, like N. C. Wyeth - were destroyed.

“The Death of Siegfried” by Howard Pyle (E. Clément, engraver)

Margaret of Cortona

“...the illustration for ‘Margaret of Cortona’ is now in the possession of Mrs. Dan Bates, to whom I gave it some years ago,” wrote Howard Pyle from his villa in Italy on August 10, 1911.

“Mrs. Dan Bates” was the former Bertha Corson Day (1875-1968), who was, as she herself put it, “an enthusiastic pupil of Howard Pyle” for several years, starting with his very first class at the Drexel Institute in 1894. In 1899 she attended the second Summer School of Illustration at Chadd’s Ford - where she was photographed with the class on her 24th birthday. In May 1902, Miss Day married Wilmingtonian Daniel Moore Bates, Jr. (1876-1953) - already part of Pyle’s social circle - and when their daughter, Bertha, was born, Anne Poole Pyle presented her with a baby blanket she had quilted and which her husband had designed. (Incidentally, Bertha Bates - later Mrs. J. Marshall Cole, - is the only person I ever met who had known Pyle, if only slightly: she was just 6 years old when he sailed for Europe. Still...)

“Margaret of Cortona” was a poem (reprinted below) by Edith Wharton, published in Harper’s Monthly for November 1901, and - so far - this “collaboration” is the only known solid link between them. They did have several acquaintances in common, however, most notably Theodore Roosevelt and William Crary Brownell of Charles Scribner’s Sons, who edited Pyle’s The Garden Behind the Moon and several of Wharton’s works.

Wharton’s poem, by the way, (not Pyle’s illustration) was condemned by the Catholic press because of its depiction of the future Saint. Dominicana: A Magazine of Catholic Literature, for instance, said, “This poetic (?) blasphemy and historical slander is an evidence of extremely bad taste, because it offends against the canons of fact and truthful record.” Harper’s Monthly even went so far as to print an apology for publishing it.

Margaret of Cortona
by Edith Wharton

Fra Paolo, since they say the end is near,
And you of all men have the gentlest eyes,
Most like our father Francis; since you know
How I have toiled and prayed and scourged and striven,
Mothered the orphan, waked beside the sick,
Gone empty that mine enemy might eat,
Given bread for stones in famine years, and channelled
With vigilant knees the pavement of this cell,
Till I constrained the Christ upon the wall
To bend His thorn-crowned Head in mute forgiveness...
Three times He bowed it...(but the whole stands writ,
Sealed with the Bishop’s signet, as you know),
Once for each person of the Blessed Three -
A miracle that the whole town attests,
The very babes thrust forward for my blessing,
And either parish plotting for my bones—
Since this you know: sit near and bear with me.

I have lain here, these many empty days
I thought to pack with Credos and Hail Marys
So close that not a fear should force the door -
But still, between the blessed syllables
That taper up like blazing angel heads,
Praise over praise, to the Unutterable,
Strange questions clutch me, thrusting fiery arms,
As though, athwart the close-meshed litanies,
My dead should pluck at me from hell, with eyes
Alive in their obliterated faces!...
I have tried the saints’ names and our blessed Mother’s
Fra Paolo, I have tried them o’er and o’er,
And like a blade bent backward at first thrust
They yield and fail me—and the questions stay.
And so I thought, into some human heart,
Pure, and yet foot-worn with the tread of sin,
If only I might creep for sanctuary,
It might be that those eyes would let me rest...

Fra Paolo, listen. How should I forget
The day I saw him first? (You know the one.)
I had been laughing in the market-place
With others like me, I the youngest there,
Jostling about a pack of mountebanks
Like flies on carrion (I the youngest there!),
Till darkness fell; and while the other girls
Turned this way, that way, as perdition beckoned,
I, wondering what the night would bring, half hoping:
If not, this once, a child’s sleep in my garret,
At least enough to buy that two-pronged coral
The others covet ‘gainst the evil eye,
Since, after all, one sees that I’m the youngest -
So, muttering my litany to hell
(The only prayer I knew that was not Latin),
Felt on my arm a touch as kind as yours,
And heard a voice as kind as yours say “Come.”
I turned and went; and from that day I never
Looked on the face of any other man.
So much is known; so much effaced; the sin
Cast like a plague-struck body to the sea,
Deep, deep into the unfathomable pardon -
(The Head bowed thrice, as the whole town attests).
What more, then? To what purpose? Bear with me! -

It seems that he, a stranger in the place,
First noted me that afternoon and wondered:
How grew so white a bud in such black slime,
And why not mine the hand to pluck it out?
Why, so Christ deals with souls, you cry - what then?
Not so! Not so! When Christ, the heavenly gardener,
Plucks flowers for Paradise (do I not know?),
He snaps the stem above the root, and presses
The ransomed soul between two convent walls,
A lifeless blossom in the Book of Life.
But when my lover gathered me, he lifted
Stem, root and all - ay, and the clinging mud -
And set me on his sill to spread and bloom
After the common way, take sun and rain,
And make a patch of brightness for the street,
Though raised above rough fingers—so you make
A weed a flower, and others, passing, think:
“Next ditch I cross, I’ll lift a root from it,
And dress my window”...and the blessing spreads.
Well, so I grew, with every root and tendril
Grappling the secret anchorage of his love,
And so we loved each other till he died....

Ah, that black night he left me, that dead dawn
I found him lying in the woods, alive
To gasp my name out and his life-blood with it,
As though the murderer’s knife had probed for me
In his hacked breast and found me in each wound...
Well, it was there Christ came to me, you know,
And led me home—just as that other led me.
(Just as that other? Father, bear with me!)
My lover’s death, they tell me, saved my soul,
And I have lived to be a light to men.
And gather sinners to the knees of grace.
All this, you say, the Bishop’s signet covers.
But stay! Suppose my lover had not died?
(At last my question! Father, help me face it.)
I say: Suppose my lover had not died -
Think you I ever would have left him living,
Even to be Christ’s blessed Margaret?
- We lived in sin? Why, to the sin I died to
That other was as Paradise, when God
Walks there at eventide, the air pure gold,
And angels treading all the grass to flowers!
He was my Christ—he led me out of hell -
He died to save me (so your casuists say!) -
Could Christ do more? Your Christ out-pity mine?
Why, yours but let the sinner bathe His feet;
Mine raised her to the level of his heart...
And then Christ’s way is saving, as man’s way
Is squandering - and the devil take the shards!
But this man kept for sacramental use
The cup that once had slaked a passing thirst;
This man declared: “The same clay serves to model
A devil or a saint; the scribe may stain
The same fair parchment with obscenities,
Or gild with benedictions; nay,” he cried,
“Because a satyr feasted in this wood,
And fouled the grasses with carousing foot,
Shall not a hermit build his chapel here
And cleanse the echoes with his litanies?
The sodden grasses spring again - why not
The trampled soul? Is man less merciful
Than nature, good more fugitive than grass?”
And so - if, after all, he had not died,
And suddenly that door should know his hand,
And with that voice as kind as yours he said:
“Come, Margaret, forth into the sun again,
Back to the life we fashioned with our hands
Out of old sins and follies, fragments scorned
Of more ambitious builders, yet by Love,
The patient architect, so shaped and fitted
That not a crevice let the winter in - ”
Think you my bones would not arise and walk,
This bruised body (as once the bruised soul)
Turn from the wonders of the seventh heaven
As from the antics of the market-place?
If this could be (as I so oft have dreamed),
I, who have known both loves, divine and human,
Think you I would not leave this Christ for that?

- I rave, you say? You start from me, Fra Paolo?
Go, then; your going leaves me not alone.
I marvel, rather, that I feared the question,
Since, now I name it, it draws near to me
With such dear reassurance in its eyes,
And takes your place beside me...

Nay, I tell you,
Fra Paolo, I have cried on all the saints -
If this be devil’s prompting, let them drown it
In Alleluias! Yet not one replies.
And, for the Christ there—is He silent too?
Your Christ? Poor father; you that have but one,
And that one silent - how I pity you!
He will not answer? Will not help you cast
The devil out? But hangs there on the wall,
Blind wood and bone - ?

How if I call on Him -
I, whom He talks with, as the town attests?
If ever prayer hath ravished me so high
That its wings failed and dropped me in Thy breast,
Christ, I adjure Thee! By that naked hour
Of innermost commixture, when my soul
Contained Thee as the paten holds the host,
Judge Thou alone between this priest and me;
Nay, rather, Lord, between my past and present,
Thy Margaret and that other’s - whose she is
By right of salvage - and whose call should follow!
Thine? Silent still. - Or his, who stooped to her,
And drew her to Thee by the bands of love?
Not Thine? Then his?

Ah, Christ—the thorn-crowned Head
Bends...bends again...down on your knees, Fra Paolo!
If his, then Thine!

Kneel, priest, for this is heaven...

“Surprised by the Hero of Seventy Fights”

“Surprised by the Hero of Seventy Fights - The Good Lord James of Douglas” - another long lost work by Howard Pyle - will be sold at auction this coming Saturday. By “long lost” I mean that for almost 130 years the greater public has only been able to see a small wood engraving of it - that is, provided they could find copies of the magazine and books in which it first (and perhaps only) appeared.

Pyle painted the 13.5 x 16.5" black and white oil on canvas (or canvas board?) sometime in late 1885 or early 1886. It illustrated the true (or truish) story of “The Little Donna Juana” - subtitled “An October Story of the Moors of Spain, and how the good Lord James of Douglas kept his Hallow E’en. a.d. 1340” - one of Elbridge S. Brooks’s series “The Cycle of Children” in the juvenile magazine Wide Awake for October 1886. The following year, it was published by D. Lothrop & Company (publisher of the magazine) in Storied Holidays, A Cycle of Red-Letter Days.

Both publications (as well as subsequent British editions of the book) featured the 3.8 x 4.5" wood engraving of the picture made by George Leander Cowee (1852-1908). Cowee, like so many of the engravers of his generation, did an admirable job, but it’s still more of an interpretation than an exact reproduction, and it lacks much of the warmth, softness, and subtlety of Pyle’s original.

Although Pyle probably sold the picture outright (for, I gather, about $75) to Lothrop, it somehow made its way back to where Pyle painted it: the catalog entry states that the picture comes “From the collection of Mr. and Mrs. William Walker of Wilmington, Delaware. This piece was handed down from his father, who worked for the DuPont family.”

“Surprised by the hero of seventy fights The Great [sic] Lord James of Douglas” is Lot 80 in Day One of Wooten & Wooten’s Fall Americana auction at 1036 Broad Street, Camden, South Carolina, on November 14, 2015.

A Forgotten Tale by Arthur Conan Doyle!

Pardon the clickbait title, but I couldn’t resist after yesterday’s “news” that a “lost” Sherlock Holmes story “by” Arthur Conan Doyle had come to light. Fortunately, last night, Mattias Boström, a bona fide Doyle scholar, wrote an article which dismantled the hastily made claims. (Before being eclipsed by Howard Pyle, Doyle and Holmes were the objects of my obsession, and I still dip into their worlds from time to time.)

Now, about “A Forgotten Tale” by Arthur Conan Doyle...

It was a poem, not a tale per se, and it has no Sherlockian content. Evidently, Dr. Doyle (as he was often referred to, then) wrote it not long before he visited the United States for the first time, in 1894. In fact, the manuscript of “A Forgotten Tale” seems to have sailed from England just a few weeks - or even days - before the doctor himself did: Scribner’s Magazine accepted it on September 27, 1894, and Doyle arrived in New York on October 2nd. As the poem was scheduled to appear in the January 1895 issue (which would be on the newsstands by mid-December), Scribner’s must have commissioned Howard Pyle to illustrate it almost immediately.

I assume Edward L. Burlingame, editor of Scribner’s Magazine, communicated by letter or in person with Doyle about the poem - and possibly its illustrations. He may even have put Doyle in touch with Pyle, seeing as he had done just that with Rudyard Kipling regarding Pyle’s illustrations for “McAndrews’ Hymn” [sic] - soon to be printed in the December 1894 Scribner’s. Then again, Kipling had asked outright “if you could kindly place me in communication with your artist as it is possible that he might see his way to using some of my suggestions.” But Doyle may not have cared as much, or at all, about the pictures for “A Forgotten Tale”.

And, unfortunately, there’s no paper trail to answer that question. I hunted extensively through the Scribner Archives at Princeton and found nothing. Equally frustrating is that, when Doyle arrived, Pyle may very well have been in the midst of - or had recently finished - illustrating Doyle’s “The Parasite” for Harper’s Weekly, which was to appear in four installments (and in book form) while Doyle was in the United States! There, too, however, I have yet to find any correspondence between Doyle and Pyle or Harper & Brothers concerning the project.

What’s also maddening is that, during his travels, Doyle met “Howells, Cable, Eugene Field, Garland, Riley” - all of whom Pyle had met, and some of whom he knew very well - and was feted again and again by folks in Pyle’s social or professional circles. And, lo and behold, Doyle and Pyle were even in Philadelphia on the same day! Saturday, November 10, 1894, found Pyle lecturing at the Drexel Institute that afternoon and Doyle lecturing that evening - but, again, who knows if they encountered each other, or if Pyle attended the Doyle event?

And later, after Doyle spent Thanksgiving with Kipling in Vermont, he wrote to his mother, “Have you read his poem, McAndrews Hymn, in Scribner’s Xmas number. It’s grand!” But God forbid he should say anything about Pyle’s illustrations. Pyle, meanwhile, must have written down something about Doyle’s writings, but so far nothing has surfaced. I’ll keep looking.

My frustrations aside...

If Scribner’s Magazine accepted “A Forgotten Tale” on September 27, 1894, they probably didn’t get Pyle on board for upwards of a week or more. And as the printed magazine would need to be out in mid-December (and factoring in time before that to prepare photo-engraved plates of the illustrations), it’s safe to say that Pyle made his drawings sometime between mid-October and late November 1894 - all the while Doyle was travelling across the United States.

I have to admit that I’ve never been overly fond of Pyle’s “A Forgotten Tale” pictures. The first one feels too Daniel Vierge-like: but Pyle may have deliberately tried to inject some “Spanish” flavor into it, since the poem is set in Mediaeval Spain. And the second drawing is somewhat hampered by the backlighting. Then again, Pyle’s pen-work was in a sort of transitional phase, and he may have done these in a hurry: he was his usual busy self, writing and illustrating, and he had also just started teaching. His original pen-and-inks haven’t turned up, by the way, nor have his oil paintings for “The Parasite”. Somehow I’m not surprised.

Anyway, after two exhausting months, Doyle sailed off on December 8, 1894. I assume Scribner’s Magazine for January 1895 was still in production at the time, but surely Doyle saw a copy of the finished product (either the American or British edition) not long after he returned home.

Incidentally, Doyle’s departure date conflicted with the Authors’ Reception at the Juvenile Order of the Round Table in New York, to which he had been invited. And who was also invited and - reportedly - attended? Howard Pyle. Of course.

In the end, since Doyle didn’t return to the States until 1914 and since Pyle didn’t go to Europe until 1910-11 - and stayed almost entirely in Italy (where Doyle wasn’t) - they never met again, if they ever met in the first place.

However, the Sherlockian in me takes some solace in the fact that while a sickly Pyle was recuperating in a Rome hotel room in December 1910, his secretary noted how he “was soon absorbed in the Strand Magazine” - the Christmas issue of which featured “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” by Arthur Conan Doyle.

A FORGOTTEN TALE
by Arthur Conan Doyle

There still remains in one of the valleys of the Cantabrian mountains in northern Spain a small hill called “Colla de los Inglesos.” It marks the spot where three hundred bowmen of the Black Prince’s army were surrounded by several thousand Spanish cavalry, and after a long and gallant resistance, were entirely destroyed.


Say, what saw you on the hill,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“I saw my brindled heifer there,
A trail of bowmen, spent and bare
A little man on a roan mare
And a tattered flag before them.”

Say, what saw you in the vale,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“There I saw my lambing ewe,
And an army riding through,
Thick and brave the pennons flew
From the lance-heads o’er them.”

Say, what saw you on the hill,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“I saw beside the milking byre,
White with want and black with mire,
A little man with face afire
Marshalling his bowmen.”

Say, what saw you in the vale,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“There I saw my bullocks twain
And the hardy men of Spain
With bloody heel and slackened rein,
Closing on their foemen.”

Nay, but there is more to tell,
Garcia, the herdsman.
“More I might not bide to view,
I had other things to do,
Tending on the lambing ewe,
Down among the clover.”

Prithee tell me what you heard,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“Shouting from the mountain side,
Shouting until eventide,
But it dwindled and it died
Ere milking time was over.”

Ah, but saw you nothing more,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“Yes, I saw them lying there,
The little man and roan mare,
And in their ranks the bowmen bare
With their staves before them.”

And the hardy men of Spain,
Garcia, the herdsman?
“Hush, but we are Spanish too,
More I may not say to you,
May God’s benison, like dew,
Gently settle o’er them.”

Howard Pyle’s Werewolf

“The Werewolf” by Howard Pyle in The Ladies’ Home Journal for March 1896

Werewolf? There wolf. (There - no, there, in the middle foreground of the picture - just squint a little and you’ll see it.)

Yes, who knew that Howard Pyle had painted one? But so he did, to illustrate “The Werewolf” by the Chicago poet and humorist Eugene Field, who perhaps is best remembered for “Wynken, Blynken and Nod” and “The Duel” (also known as “The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat”).

Pyle met Field at least once, at a dinner honoring Thomas Bailey Aldrich at The Aldine Club in New York on March 24, 1893, where the other guests included James Whitcomb Riley, Frank R. Stockton, Charles Dudley Warner, and William Dean Howells - all of whom had made significant contributions to the “juvenile literature” of the period. Whether they had met before or after or regularly corresponded, I don’t yet know, but on November 3, 1895, Pyle inscribed a copy of his newly-published novel, The Garden Behind the Moon, “To Eugene Field, My fellow worker in the world of Art” and added (in his confusingly hifalutin way):

For as the spoken word is like a breath of wind that maybe stirs the world around to agitation that soon is still again, so is the written word like a stone of rock cut out from the bosom of humanity, to endure for generations and for ages.

And as a pebble cast into the sea shall cause a movement to be felt in the uttermost parts of the waters for ever, so shall our work, cast into the bosom of futurity cause its motive to be felt to the furthermost ebb and flood of Eternity.

How great then, O! brother, our endeavour for good and for truth.

Inscription from Howard Pyle to Eugene Field, November 3, 1895 (via Bonhams)

But Field never read this: the day after Pyle inscribed the book, Field suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 45. Shocked, Pyle sent both the book and a letter “expressing his deep sympathies and fond memories” to the Field’s widow on November 10th. “That you appreciated his lofty aims[,] his nobility of thought[,] his humane efforts and the success that crowned them is shown in your words,” wrote Mrs. Field later that month, and she assured Pyle “of a lasting place in my thoughts for Gene’s sake” and called The Garden Behind the Moon “a story after my own heart.”

Then came “The Werewolf.” According to a syndicated news item, Field had been writing and rewriting the story since 1884:

His last revision pleased him and he decided to print it. But death came too suddenly, and the story was found, unpublished, among his effects. Mrs. Field, concluding to have the story appear, gave it to the editor of The Ladies Home Journal, in which magazine all of Mr. Field’s work, outside of his newspaper articles, was presented to the public.

And of course it needed to be illustrated. An article in the January 3, 1943, edition of The Sunday Morning Star of Wilmington, Delaware, quoted “a Wilmington man” who had been an associate editor of the The Ladies’ Home Journal and who recalled his 1895 visit to Pyle:

It is remembered that Mr. Pyle’s working quarters were crowded with costumes, guns and ships of the Revolutionary era. I was advised that Mr. Pyle was always busy, and it was a difficult assignment for the youthful editor of a magazine. However, the artist consented to make the picture after learning that it was to illustrate the last literary work of the Chicago poet and humorist. Mr. Pyle admitted that he was an admirer of Field, and inasmuch as the story suggested just the type of drawing that he had been anxious to make he accepted the commission and was authorized to write his own check.

The illustration was for “The Werewolf” and it was believed that it represented the best work of Mr. Pyle as well as the best story by the author of “Little Boy Blue,” and it was so regarded by admirers of both artistic and author. The illustration was lauded greatly, for Mr. Pyle had drawn the ghost of a snarling wolf, fitting the text admirably.

The fee is not known, but it included publication rights and “The Werewolf” painting itself. And Pyle must have painted it sometime between mid- or late November 1895 and January 1896, since by February it was on display in Chicago in a travelling exhibition of illustrations made for the Journal. In a review of the show, the Inter Ocean of Sunday, February 1, 1896, called Pyle’s painting “a weird, uncanny-looking thing, possessing strange fascination.” The next day, the same paper noted:

In this work Mr. Pyle experimented using red and black oils on canvas. The result is something weird and fascinating. In the foreground is the fabled monster, the “were-wolf,” a horrible creature dimly outlined; in the background is a party of pleasure-seekers, terror-stricken, fleeing for their lives. The scene is laid in a dark and dreary wood.

That same day, the Chicago Tribune said:

A striking picture in oil by Howard Pyle to illustrate “The Werewolf,” an unpublished tale by Eugene Field, is the strongest thing in the collection. Indeed, it is said Pyle himself regards it as the best work he has ever done.

It was admired by other attendees of the exhibit as well, including members of Field’s family. On February 27, 1896, his sister-in-law Henrietta Dexter Field wrote Pyle “to express the admiration and deep appreciation both my husband, Roswell Field, and myself have for the beautiful illustration you designed for ‘The Werewolf’”:

We saw the painting at “The Ladies Home Journal” exhibition of pictures here and were more than gratified that the public seemed to appreciate its beauties, as there were always crowds standing before it. If Eugene were here I feel sure that he would be more than pleased that you caught his idea so beautifully, and he doubtless would write you words of appreciation more suitable than these, whose only merit lies in the expression of the love of a sorrowing brother and sister.

The Chicago exhibition slightly pre-dated the publication of the picture in The Ladies’ Home Journal for March 1896, where - in a halftone plate engraved by Albert Munford Lindsay (who, I might add, attended some of Pyle’s illustration classes at the Drexel Institute and visited Pyle at his home at about this time) - it was wordily titled, “The werewolf skulked for a moment in the shadow of the yews, and Yseult plucked old Siegfried’s spear from her girdle.” Echoing the Inter Ocean, The New York Times of March 11, 1896, called it “a weird drawing...that is mystic and suggestive while thoroughly original.”

And, indeed, Pyle liked it enough to borrow it back from the publisher for his one-man shows at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia and the St. Botolph Club in Boston in 1897. The following year it was exhibited in Washington, D.C. - and perhaps elsewhere - again under the auspices of the The Ladies’ Home Journal. The Curtis Publishing Company (publisher of Journal) also issued it as a 12 x 15" print around the same time.

But then a fog rolls into the painting’s history: the anonymous associate editor quoted above also said, “It was long carefully displayed in the editor’s office” - and I assume, here, he was referring to editor-in-chief Edward W. Bok - “but [then it] mysteriously disappeared, and all attempts to relocate it have failed.”

Somehow, however, it wound up in the possession of Charles William Hargens, Jr. (1893-1997) and his wife Marjorie Allen (Garman) Hargens (1895-1978), illustrators both, who lived for many years in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. And then it went to their son, engineer Charles William Hargens III (1918-2013), and then to his estate.

And now it’s for sale: Freeman’s will auction the painting in Philadelphia on June 8, 2014. The estimate is $8,000-12,000. I consider that to be conservative, considering its size - 18 x 24 inches - and relative importance - but we’ll soon find out!

“The Werewolf” by Howard Pyle (via Freeman’s)

The Queen of Ireland seeks to slay Sir Tristram

A semi-desperate attempt on my part to post something “Irish” on this St. Patrick’s Day: “The Queen of Ireland seeks to slay Sir Tristram” comes from Howard Pyle’s second volume of his Arthuriad, The Story of the Champions of the Round Table, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1905.

As far as I know, the original pen-and-ink has yet to surface on the market or in a museum. It’s an interesting composition and it takes some staring at to make sense of what’s going on. Or one could simply read the passage it illustrates:

Now whilst Sir Tristram was in that bath, the Queen [of Ireland] and Belle Isoult looked all about his chamber. And they beheld the sword of Sir Tristram where it lay, for he had laid it upon the bed when he had unlatched the belt to make himself ready for that bath. Then the Queen said to the Lady Belle Isoult, “See what a great huge sword this is,” and thereupon she lifted it and drew the blade out of its sheath, and she beheld what a fair, bright, glistering sword it was. Then in a little she saw where, within about a foot and a half from the point, there was a great piece in the shape of a half-moon broken out of the edge of the sword; and she looked at that place for a long while. Then of a sudden she felt a great terror, for she remembered how even such a piece of sword as that which had been broken off from that blade, she had found in the wound of Sir Marhaus of which he had died. So she stood for a while holding that sword of Sir Tristram in her hand and looking as she had been turned into stone. At this the Lady Belle Isoult was filled with a sort of fear, wherefore she said, “Lady, what ails you?” The Queen said, “Nothing that matters,” and therewith she laid aside the sword of Sir Tristram and went very quickly to her own chamber. There she opened her cabinet and took thence the piece of sword-blade which she had drawn from the wound of Sir Marhaus, and which she had kept ever since. With this she hurried back to the chamber of Sir Tristram, and fitted that piece of the blade to the blade; and lo! it fitted exactly, and without flaw.

Upon that the Queen was seized as with a sudden madness; for she shrieked out in a very loud voice, “Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!” saying that word three times. Therewith she snatched up the sword of Sir Tristram and she ran with great fury into the room where he lay in his bath. And she beheld him where he was there all naked in his bath, and therewith she rushed at him and lashed at him with his sword. But Sir Tristram threw himself to one side and so that blow failed of its purpose. Then the Queen would have lashed at him again or have thrust him through with the weapon; but at that Gouvernail and Sir Helles ran to her and catched her and held her back, struggling and screaming very violently. So they took the sword away from her out of her hands, and all the while she shrieked like one gone entirely distracted.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Howard Pyle’s Don Quixote

Many of Howard Pyle’s pictures are well-documented. Some, not so much. For example, correspondence concerning the creation of “The Fate of a Treasure Town” series of pirate paintings - among the most notable of Pyle’s later works - has yet to surface.

The same - or even less - can be said of Pyle’s sole known illustration of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In fact, the only documentation that I’ve seen are its entries in the two Pyle bibliographies and a note in the Pyle scrapbook at the Delaware Art Museum stating - rather vaguely - that the original painting was sold in Philadelphia. When or to whom it was sold is not indicated and the original has yet to turn up, so we don’t know its size, its palette, or anything else. One day, maybe.

Until then, here is Howard Pyle’s “Don Quixote’s Encounter with the Windmill” as it appeared in the November 1901 issue of The Century Magazine, part of a special feature titled “Three Pictures of Don Quixote” (the other two were by Arthur I. Keller and André Castaigne). Engraver Frank H. Wellington sweetened the 7.6 x 5.0" duotone plate, which, unfortunately, was printed out of register.

Pyle used to do that to his paintings now and then

I spent Friday in the Delaware Art Museum’s library and among the many things I looked at (again) were three enormous, leather-bound scrapbooks of Howard Pyle’s published work.

Pyle and his secretary Gertrude Brincklé seem to have started compiling them in 1910. The first leaves of Volume I feature Pyle’s own handwritten comments about some of his earliest printed things. But then he either lost interest, got distracted or too busy, or left for Italy, so Miss Brincklé must have done the bulk of the finding, trimming, gluing, and annotating. Most of her notes - besides basic bibliographical ones - concern the known owners of particular pictures and if she had posed for any of them. However (as I mentioned in my last post) she also wrote beneath at least a half dozen reproductions the disturbing words, “Destroyed by H.P.” or “Destroyed by Mr. Pyle”.

Now, in the course of my Pyle research I’ve been putting together the skeleton of a very rudimentary catalogue raisonnée (well, a checklist) of his pictures, so it’s always good to know where things have wound up. But it’s never pleasant to learn that certain things have been lost for good. I suppose that if Pyle considered his actions “justifiable picturacide” then we should accept the fate of what he deemed unworthy. Plenty of artists have done what he did, after all... But would if I could go back in time and rescue these from the trash or the furnace or wherever he disposed of them - despite their faults and Pyle’s low opinion.

Anyway, here’s a little memorial gallery for these six gone-but-not-fogotten paintings.

“He climbed the stairs slowly, for he was growing feeble”

From “The Story of Adhelmar” by James Branch Cabell
Harper’s Monthly Magazine, April 1904

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“Catherine de Vaucelles, in her garden”

From “In Necessity’s Mortar” by James Branch Cabell
Harper’s Monthly Magazine, October 1904

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“I know thy heart, that thou dost love me well”

From “The King’s Jewel” by James Edmund Dunning
Harper’s Weekly, December 10, 1904

Note: next to Miss Brincklé’s “Destroyed by Mr. Pyle" someone wrote a question mark, so maybe this one escaped the axe, after all?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“A man lay prone there, half turned upon his face” also known as “After the Battle”

From “Melicent” by Warwick Deeping
Harper’s Monthly Magazine, January 1905

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“Sir John shook his spear at the ladies who sneered”

From “Melicent” by Warwick Deeping
Harper’s Monthly Magazine, January 1905

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“With a cry, Shallum flung up his arms and jumped” also known as “A Leap from the Cliff”

From “An Amazing Belief” by Mrs. Henry Dudeney
Harper’s Monthly Magazine, April 1905

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ave atque vale!

The Late Catherine de Vaucelles

“Catherine de Vaucelles, in her garden” by Howard Pyle (1904)

What do you think of this Howard Pyle painting? It’s not so bad, right? It’s hard to see in this off-register plate, but it’s got its strengths: the dress and the blossoms are handled nicely, the composition and color are interesting... Aren’t they?

I’ve shown this one before. In The New York Times Saturday Review of Books for October 22, 1904, it was singled out for some stinging criticism:

Here we have the picture of a Japanese doll, and - was ever such a thing heard of? - the doll has goitre. Not as yet a fully developed case; but it’s there, and is quite pronounced. The face is a blank wall; but there - dolls’ faces generally are devoid of expression. Some of the material left over from constructing the gown has been utilised in building a mouth. Was the moon an afterthought? It would seem so, for it is not night. Apple blossoms don't look like that by moonlight; neither does a red dress. At any rate, putting the moon there was a lucky hit - we might almost say an inspiration - for it draws the eye away from the doll-faced woman.

In fairness to Pyle, the above comments reflect more on the relatively primitive reproduction than on the painting itself. So it would help to see the original oil on canvas.

If only. It turns out that Pyle wasn’t very pleased with it, either. Yesterday, looking in one of Pyle’s scrapbooks at the Delaware Art Museum’s library I found “Catherine de Vaucelles, in her garden” and underneath the plate, his secretary Gertrude Brincklé had written: “Destroyed by H.P.”

I found five others - all published in 1904 and 1905 - with the same, sad note. I’ll memorialize them another time.

“He lay awhile conscious of great comfort”

It’s a beautiful day, so here’s a beautiful Howard Pyle painting of a beautiful day. The reproduction is dodgy and the original painting is missing, so who knows what the colors really are, but they’re still effective and the composition is unusual and interesting.

Pyle painted “He lay awhile conscious of great comfort" for Justus Miles Forman’s “The Island of Enchantment” in the October 1905 issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine. It later appeared in the book of the same title. So far, I’ve found no record of it being exhibited; maybe Pyle sold it soon after it was published.

It’s always useful to compare Pyle’s results with the text, so here is Foreman’s description of the scene:

That his eyes opened upon blue sky instead of upon painted or carved ceiling roused in him no astonishment. In service against the Turks and against the Genoese he had often slept in the open, waking when the morning light became strong enough to force its way through his eyelids. He lay awhile, conscious of great comfort and bodily well-being, coming slowly and lazily into full possession of his faculties. The air was fresh and warm, with a scent of thyme in it, and from somewhere in the near distance sea-birds mewed plaintively, after their kind. He dropped his eyes from the pale-blue sky and saw that though he lay upon turf - a hill it would seem, or the crest of a cliff - there was a stretch of tranquil sea before him, a narrow stretch, and beyond this a mountain range looming sheer and barren from the water's edge.

The sun must be rising behind it, he said to himself, for the tips of the serrated peaks glowed golden, momentarily brighter, so that it hurt his eyes to watch them. He wondered what mountains these could be, and then, all in a flash, it came upon him where he was - that this was Arbe, and that ridge the Velebic mountains of the main-land....

The woman who had saved his life half knelt, half sat behind him, and upon her knees his head had lain. At this moment she was leaning back a little, with her head and shoulders against a small tree which stood there, and her eyes were closed as if she were asleep.

On “The Story of Adhelmar”

“He found Mélite alone” by Howard Pyle (1904)

“I am most pleased that my illustrations for your Story of Adhelmar should have met with your approval,” wrote Howard Pyle to James Branch Cabell on June 12, 1904. “A good story is always a great inspiration for an illustrator, and I hope I may have the pleasure of illustrating many more of yours.”

It’s funny, though: Pyle’s three pictures for “The Story of Adhelmar” weren’t so inspired. John K. Hoyt’s criticism of Pyle (which I’ve reprinted in full) zeros in on two of them. Of “He found Mélite alone” Hoyt wrote:

Here we have a wooden image sitting, garbed in the habiliments of a woman, with a heavy mat of jute, in lieu of hair, falling from her head to her waist. The figure is devoid of any lines indicative of feminine grace; it might be the figure of a boy - a wooden boy. The arms in those sleeves are not made of flesh and bones and muscle, but of good solid oak. The expression of the face betokens intense, sullen stupidity. A knight clad in armor stands in the doorway, leaning against the jamb for support, evidently bereft of strength - as well he may be - at the ugliness of the thing.

Meanwhile, “He sang for her as they sat in the gardens”...

...represents a woman with a faded, washed-out face; a silly, simpering face; and whose right side has been developed at the expense of the left. And then, while gazing, one is stricken with deep compassion, as he perceives that this poor creature has curvature of the spine, and he wonders how, under the circumstances, she can even simper. In this figure also there are no lines to indicate the sex.

“He sang for her as they sat in the gardens” by Howard Pyle (1904)

“These two compositions are enough to drive the luckless author of ‘The Story of Adhelmar’ frantic,” Hoyt went on. “And if he has survived the sight of them, he is doubtless now going about in quest of the artist and thirsting for his gore.” Cruel assessments, perhaps, but he makes some good points.

Even so, the “luckless” Cabell was pleased with the set of illustrations and had written to Pyle on March 27, 1904: “I wish that I could properly express my admiration for the magnificent pictures you have made for the ‘Story of Adhelmar.’ But as I cannot, will you not take the word for the deed?” Pyle’s letter of June 12th (quoted above) was in response to this praise.

That same June, however, Pyle wrote to editor Thomas Bucklin Wells of Harper’s Monthly Magazine, “Again let me urge you not to send me too much medieval work.” But Wells seems to have ignored the request (or Pyle didn’t stand firm) and after another three years of illustrating Cabell and many other seemingly middling authors, Pyle complained to Wells on April 23, 1907:

I am in great danger of grinding out conventional magazine illustrations for conventional magazine stories. I feel myself now to be at the height of my powers, and in the next ten or twelve years I should look to do the best work of my life. I do not think that it is right for me to spend so great a part of my time in manufacturing drawings for magazine stories which I cannot regard as having any really solid or permanent literary value. Mr. Cabell’s stories, for instance, are very clever, and far above the average of magazine literature, but they are neither exactly true to history nor exactly fanciful, and, whilst I have made the very best illustrations for them which I am capable of making, I feel that they are not true to medieval life, and that they lack a really permanent value such as I should now endeavor to present to the world.

Of course, when Pyle wrote that letter, he only had four and a half years to live - not ten or twelve - and - despite his protestations - he and Harper’s Monthly continued on a similar path until his death.

“He climbed the stairs slowly, for he was growing feeble” by Howard Pyle (1904)

“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)

“Myles, as in a dream, kneeled, and presented the letter”

“Myles, as in a dream, kneeled, and presented the letter” illustrates the following passage from the second installment of Howard Pyle’s novel Men of Iron in Harper's Young People for January 27, 1891:

[The Earl of Mackworth] was a tall man, taller even than Myles’s father. He had a thin face, deep-set bushy eyebrows, and a hawk nose. His upper lip was clean shaven, but from his chin a flowing beard of iron-gray hung nearly to his waist. He was clad in a riding-gown of black velvet that hung a little lower than the knee, trimmed with otter fur and embroidered with silver goshawks - the crest of the family of Beaumont.

A light shirt of link mail showed beneath the gown as he walked, and a pair of soft undressed leather riding-boots were laced as high as the knee, protecting his scarlet hose from mud and dirt. Over his shoulders he wore a collar of enamelled gold, from which hung a magnificent jewelled pendant, and upon his fist he carried a beautiful Iceland falcon.

As Myles stood staring, he suddenly heard Gascoyne’s voice whisper in his ear, “Yon is my Lord; go forward and give him thy letter.”

Scarcely knowing what he did, he walked towards the Earl like a machine, his heart pounding within him and a great humming in his ears. As he drew near, the nobleman stopped for a moment and stared at him, and Myles, as in a dream, kneeled, and presented the letter.

Pyle’s devoted student Thornton Oakley bought the original black and white oil painting (7.75 x 10.5" - done in Summer or Fall of 1890) from Herb Roth for $42.00! It now lives at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

This one - like a few others from the novel - makes me ache. Is it the almost photographic “presence”? The deceptively simple composition? The grouping of figures, tones, textures? Pyle is lauded for his scenes of dramatic action, but time and again I’m more affected by his scenes of dramatic inaction.

The First Christmas Tree

“The First Christmas Tree” by Howard Pyle illustrated “The Oak of Geismar” by Henry Van Dyke in Scribner’s Magazine for December 1891. It was engraved on wood by Walter Montieth Aikman.

“The Doll Has Goitre” and Other Criticisms of Howard Pyle

Figure 1. “Her whisper was so soft he only guessed the words“ from "The Stairway of Honor" by Maud Stepney Rawson in Harper's Monthly Magazine for January 1904

One might think that Howard Pyle was universally lauded during his lifetime. But he had his critics. John K. Hoyt was one, and his stinging - yet amusing - long letter to The New York Times was printed on October 22, 1904. I've reprinted it in full, below, and - in case you don’t have scattered issues of Harper’s Monthly Magazine for 1904 at your elbow - I’ve inserted the illustrations to which Hoyt refers.


Mr. Pyle’s Illustrations

New York Times Book Review:

I wonder if the great periodicals of the day have art censors on their staffs. This thought occurs on seeing so much poor work in many of their illustrations. Take Harper's Monthly Magazine, for example. For some time it has been publishing illustrations in color by Mr. Howard Pyle. Mr. Pyle’s reputation stands high, and deservedly so. He can do good work, and he should keep his contributions up to the standard for excellence; but some of his drawings are distinctly bad. Not only that, but they are irrelevant to the story he attempts to illustrate. For instance, take the short story in the January number entitled "The Stairway of Honor." The hero, an artist, is a gentleman, and endowed with a keen sense of honor, while the heroine is a lady of high degree; in short a Duchess, and is very beautiful. Now turn to the frontispiece [Figure 1] - and behold! a man and woman with the faces of peasants, while that of the woman is weak and ugly, the very reverse of the woman described in the story. Both are deformed. Compare the man’s short arm and shriveled hand with his abnormal breadth of shoulder. Look at the woman's arms - both too short - and her misshapen body and her general air of awkwardness. The color in this picture is good, the drawing bad.

Figure 2. “He found Mélite alone” from “The Story of Adhelmar” by James Branch Cabell in Harper's Monthly Magazine for April 1904

In the April number the place of honor - the frontispiece [Figure 2] - is again assigned to Mr. Pyle. Here we have a wooden image sitting, garbed in the habiliments of a woman, with a heavy mat of jute, in lieu of hair, falling from her head to her waist. The figure is devoid of any lines indicative of feminine grace; it might be the figure of a boy - a wooden boy. The arms in those sleeves are not made of flesh and bones and muscle, but of good solid oak. The expression of the face betokens intense, sullen stupidity. A knight clad in armor stands in the doorway, leaning against the jamb for support, evidently bereft of strength - as well he may be - at the ugliness of the thing.

Figure 3. “He sang for her as they sat in the gardens” from “The Story of Adhelmar” by James Branch Cabell in Harper's Monthly Magazine for April 1904

Another illustration in this number, facing Page 706 [Figure 3], represents a woman with a faded, washed-out face; a silly, simpering face; and whose right side has been developed at the expense of the left. And then, while gazing, one is stricken with deep compassion, as he perceives that this poor creature has curvature of the spine, and he wonders how, under the circumstances, she can even simper. In this figure also there are no lines to indicate the sex. These two compositions are enough to drive the luckless author of “The Story of Adhelmar” frantic. And if he has survived the sight of them, he is doubtless now going about in quest of the artist and thirsting for his gore.

When it comes to art let, us be aesthetic or nothing. Let us change the titles of these two compositions and, after the manner of Whistler, call the first "A Nightmare in Blue," and the other "A Simper in White."

Figure 4. “Catherine de Vaucelles, in her garden” from “In Necessity’s Mortar” by James Branch Cabell in Harper's Monthly Magazine for October 1904

Turn to the frontispiece in the October number [Figure 4]. Here we have the picture of a Japanese doll, and - was ever such a thing heard of? - the doll has goitre. Not as yet a fully developed case; but it’s there, and is quite pronounced. The face is a blank wall; but there - dolls’ faces generally are devoid of expression. Some of the material left over from constructing the gown has been utilised in building a mouth. Was the moon an afterthought? It would seem so, for it is not night. Apple blossoms don't look like that by moonlight; neither does a red dress. At any rate, putting the moon there was a lucky hit - we might almost say an inspiration - for it draws the eye away from the doll-faced woman.

Figure 5. "Villon - The singer Fate fashioned to her liking" from “In Necessity’s Mortar” by James Branch Cabell in Harper's Monthly Magazine for October 1904

Figure 6. "The King himself hauled me out of gaol" from “In Necessity’s Mortar” by James Branch Cabell in Harper's Monthly Magazine for October 1904

Now turn to the pictures facing Pages 706 [Figure 5] and 708 [Figure 6] in this number. What a difference! Here we have good work, work that any artist might well be proud of. No uncertain touches here, no feeble lines; but good, strong drawing, and the colors laid on with the brush of a master. Mr. Pyle's backgrounds are almost always rich in color, harmonious, and effective.

I wonder why his men are so well drawn, while his women generally are not. Evidently he does not draw women from the model. Turn again to the illustration facing Page 706 in the April number [Figure 5]; compare the drawing in the figure of the man with that in the figure of the woman. Was there ever such incongruity? That of the man shows that it was drawn by an artist of the twentieth century who understands his work, while that of the woman might have been done at the time in which the story is laid, in the fourteenth century, or, rather, in justice to the artists of that time, let us say, during the paleolithic age.

Figure 7. "The drawing of the sword" from “The Sword of Ahab” by James Edmund Dunning in Harper's Monthly Magazine for August 1904

I said, I wonder why his men are drawn so well. They are not always. Turn, for instance, to the picture facing Page 335 in the August number [Figure 7]. The drawing in the figure of the man is bad. The lines are feeble, uncertain. His right shoulder is dislocated, caused doubtless - and it serves him right - by his efforts to draw the sword in that awkward and unheard-of fashion. The writer of the story fails to mention this accident; neither does he account for the presence in the picture of what is evidently an effigy from some modern wayside shrine in Italy. This only goes to show that an artist should exercise the utmost care in selecting an author to write up his pictures.

I do not claim that all women are beautiful, or that all of them have perfect figures; and if an artist chooses to portray them as ugly and deformed, he is clearly within his rights; but I maintain that when an artist is assigned to illustrating a story, he should place himself en rapport, if possible, with the author; should try to enter into his feelings, see with his eyes, depict the characters as they are described. And above all things, if the heroine is beautiful, let him make her beautiful - if he can.

JOHN K. HOYT.
Candler, North Carolina


Me (Ian Schoenherr) again:

Mr. Hoyt makes some good points: Pyle’s women, with a few exceptions, truly are the “weaker sex” - idealized, anemic, and bland. And, as the years went on, while Pyle’s pictures grew more vibrant in color, sometimes his figures lacked good construction and his compositions were oversimplified.

For the record, “the luckless author,” James Branch Cabell, thought Pyle’s illustrations for “The Story of Adhelmar“ were “magnificent.” But I never much liked “He found Mélite alone” [Figure 2] and “He sang for her as they sat in the gardens” [Figure 3] - or the third illustration, not shown. Too, the figures in "The drawing of the sword" from “The Sword of Ahab” leave something to be desired - although the setting, costumes, and color are pretty interesting.

I do like “Her whisper was so soft he only guessed the words“ [Figure 1] for its weird lighting, color, and atmosphere. The “faces of peasants” don’t bother me, but then again I’m descended from such “ugly” people.

Who knows if Pyle ever took note of Hoyt’s letter. He wrote later about “the futility of following such memoranda” and said, “Where they intend to praise they always miss the point, and where they intend to dispraise they leave, even though you know the dispraise does not amount to anything, a feeling of unpleasantness.”