Howard Pyle at Valley Forge, 1909

I just saw this interesting article by Hannah Boettcher on "Fieldwork in Valley Forge". Among other things, it shows that Howard Pyle visited Valley Forge on September 18, 1909, and signed the Washington Memorial Chapel guestbook, along with his wife and son Godfrey, as well as two Wilmington friends, John Warner (1884-1911) and his mother, Mary Cowgill Corbit Warner (1848-1923), who probably accompanied the Pyles on their trip.

Howard Pyle Meets Walter Crane

An illustration from Yankee Doodle by Howard Pyle (1881)

121 years ago today Howard Pyle met the celebrated British artist-illustrator-designer-decorator-author Walter Crane in Philadelphia.

Although Pyle’s known correspondence and writings are (so far) void of any Crane letters or mentions, Crane was clearly a big influence on Pyle - particularly on his work from the early 1880s, like Yankee Doodle, The Lady of Shalott and Pepper & Salt. And if Pyle didn’t necessarily acknowledge this, some critics did:

In the completeness and appropriateness of the cuts the book [Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood] reminds us of the best work of Mr. Walter Crane, and it can best be compared perhaps with Mr. Crane’s charming edition of the Grimm Fairy Tales... But as Mr. Crane’s art is thoroughly English Mr. Pyle’s is quite American. (The Literary World, September 22, 1883)

In 1891-92, Crane and a collection of his “Water-colours, Designs and Decorations” went on an extensive tour of the United States. In May they were in Philadelphia and Crane recalled in An Artist’s Reminiscences (1907):

My collection was shown at the Arts Club,...a dinner was given there in my honour and to inaugurate the opening. Among the guests I was interested to meet Mr. Howard Pyle, the distinguished artist, whose work I had so often admired in the American magazines. 

The champagne flowed very freely on this occasion as well as speeches, and nothing could exceed the hospitality of the Club. 

Altogether, we had a very good time at Philadelphia, and carried away many pleasant memories of the Quaker city.

Sounds like fun. But if only we knew what Pyle thought of the encounter, because a few months after it, a curious paragraph by Edward W. Bok (editor of the Ladies Home Journal) appeared in the Brooklyn Standard Union of December 24, 1892:

One thing is certain: no man has come over to us recently who created such an unfavorable impression with every one whom he met as did Walter Crane; and I say this with all due respect to Mr. Crane’s undoubted skill as an artist. But his personality struck every one as exceedingly disagreeable, and at no time have I heard of a single instance where he took the slightest pains to make himself agreeable. At two dinners at which Mr. Crane happened to, given, too, in his honor [sic], it seemed to me as if he threw a perfect damper upon both occasions. I recall one instance where Mr. Crane and Howard Pyle were thrown together, or, rather, seated next to each other at the table. Now, it is hard to imagine any one who could be unsusceptible to the deliciously frank and unrestrained charm of Howard Pyle’s conversation. But Mr. Crane was simply unmoved, the most unresponsive man in a delightful conversation I ever saw. I watched him closely upon this occasion and I actually believed that the man was bored more than he was interested. I have actually yet to hear of one kind thing said of Walter Crane in a social way during his American sojourn.

Maybe Pyle’s side of the story will turn up, one of these days.

The Sad Story of a Little Boy That Cried

Today is the 149th birthday of Katharine Pyle, Howard Pyle’s sister.

These two siblings seem to have had a conflicted relationship over the years: Howard (who was ten years older) often tried to encourage or push Katharine into a more “practical” career path, but she was too much of an independent spirit, who did things when and where and how she wanted to. At least that’s the sense one might get from reading her unpublished recollections. Katharine may even have gotten a certain glee out of exasperating her much more “controlled” brother.

Yet, for all the focus on his career, Howard Pyle couldn’t recall when his work first appeared in print. He said - more than once - that it was “The Magic Pill” in Scribner’s Monthly for July 1876. But a drawing he made for his mother’s poem “The Reformer” had appeared eight months earlier - and five years before that he made the masthead drawing for the Wilmington newspaper Every Evening. Maybe, however, Pyle was only concerned with his first published words, not his pictures. At any rate, although he may not have remembered his first time in print, his sister remembered hers:

My first finished attempt at verse was one that was taken by the St. Nicholas, and published in the department of children’s writings. Howard made a picture to go with it, and was paid for it but I, of course, was not paid for the verses as they were just a child’s contribution and I was very much disappointed that I wasn’t. They were about a child who was always crying until in the end his mouth had stretched till -

One Morning no Jackie was anywheres found,
But only a great mouth that lay on the ground;

And so that was all that was left, alack!
A great big mouth with a border of Jack.

Katharine neglected to provide a date, but searching through the pages of St. Nicholas - and page 78 of “The Letter-Box” of the November 1880 issue, in particular - one will find:

THE SAD STORY OF A LITTLE BOY THAT CRIED

Once, a little boy, Jack, was, oh! ever so good,
Till he took a strange notion to cry all he could.

So he cried all the day, and he cried all the night,
He cried in the morning and in the twilight;

He cried till his voice was as hoarse as a crow,
And his mouth grew so large it looked like a great O.

It grew at the bottom, and grew at the top;
It grew till they thought that it never would stop.

Each day his great mouth grew taller and taller,
And his dear little self grew smaller and smaller.

At last, that same mouth grew so big that - alack! -
It was only a mouth with a border of Jack.

And so this was all that was left of poor Jack:
The great gaping mouth, like a wide-open sack!

P.K. [sic]

It should be noted, however, that no picture by Katharine’s brother - or anyone - accompanies the verse. Maybe Howard made one (and got paid, unlike his sister), or maybe he didn’t; it’s still a mystery.

But the real injury to Katharine was that somebody - the publisher, the typesetter, or the editors (who included Mary Mapes Dodge and Frank Stockton at the time) - reversed her initials from “K.P.” to “P.K.”, so she didn’t even get proper credit at the time - or maybe ever. That must have hurt. (Howard, by the way, suffered a similar indignity when his fable “The Fox and the Tablet” in St. Nicholas for April 1877 was credited to “P. Howard”.) So as a 149th birthday present I thought I’d finally give Katharine the credit she deserves.

Is This Young Howard Pyle?

Figure 1. Young man photographed by Emily Webb, Wilmington, Delaware, 1870s

Is this young Howard Pyle?

I don’t know. But I really, really wish I did - and I’m 99 percent convinced that it is Howard Pyle, somewhere in his early 20s. What throws me is the size of his hands, which seem too big (Pyle had smallish hands, apparently), and the shape of his ears. But these could be optical illusions. Also, I don’t know what color hair young Pyle had, or what his hairline was like before he started balding.

His eyes, though, look right, as does his nose, brows, and especially the shape and smallness of his mouth. In 1909, a reporter noted that Pyle had “eyes blue as a fog, a small mouth, bland, but massive and singularly youthful face.” And artist James Edward Kelly remembered that when Pyle arrived in New York in 1876, “he had a high, smooth forehead; a long, smooth nose; light blue eyes; long flat jaws; rosy cheeks; a long smooth chin; small pursed mouth.”

Fortunately, there is a bona fide early photo of Pyle - Figure 2 - taken about 1875 in Owings Mills, Maryland. Here he has longish, darkish hair, and a face very much in keeping with Kelly’s description. The slope and shape of the shoulders, nose, chin, mouth, etc., etc., are also very similar to Figure 1’s.

Figure 2. Howard Pyle at Owings Mills, Maryland, c.1875

Then again, the youngish Pyle in another early photo (Figure 3) appears to have brown or maybe even reddish hair, or at least something lighter than what we see in Figure 1 - but the darker tone there could be an illusion or from Macassar oil, or something...

Figure 3. Howard Pyle, by a Philadelphia photographer, c.1880-85

Still, there is indeed something reminiscent of Figure 1 in Figure 3. Not to mention in Frances Benjamin Johnston photos of Pyle, taken when he was in his early 40s. Pyle’s face has become rounder in Figure 4 and Figure 6, but his demeanor is similar, as are his mouth and eyes.

Figure 4. Howard Pyle photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1896

Curiously and coincidentally, the photographer of Figure 1, Emily Webb, was Howard Pyle’s first-cousin-once-removed: she had grandparents in common with Pyle’s father. Emily was born on February 23, 1830, died on April 24, 1914, and somewhere along the line - and at a time when female photographers were quite rare - she set up her “Union Gallery” on Market Street in Wilmington. Her sister Sarah, meanwhile, was the wife of the Saturday Evening Post’s Henry Peterson, who was also Pyle’s mother’s first publisher.

Perhaps another, identified copy of Webb’s photo - or the use of a facial recognition system of some kind - will solve the mystery. (Though, in laying out all these things, I think I'm now 99.9 percent sure.)

Figure 5. Closeup of young man photographed by Emily Webb, Wilmington, Delaware, 1870s

Figure 6. Closeup of Howard Pyle photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1896

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

Howard Pyle’s Speech

Detail of a photograph of Howard Pyle by Frances Benjamin Johnston (1896)

Usually, when imagining Howard Pyle, the Movie, I cast Tom Wilkinson in the title role - though he might be too old for it at this point. And I’d definitely want to hear David Ogden Stiers recite Pyle’s words or narrate a Pyle documentary à la Ric Burns or Ken Burns on, maybe, PBS’s American Experience. (Stiers could have easily been cast as Pyle, too, once upon a time.) But did Pyle sound like either of these two men? It’s impossible to say, barring the discovery of a wax cylinder recording of Pyle’s voice. I dream of finding one; I doubt, though, that one exists.

So, how did Pyle sound and speak?

In a 1903 letter, Pyle told John Ferguson Weir that his voice had “a somewhat dominant and carrying quality.”  Fellow illustrator (and alleged student) Ernest Clifford Peixotto recalled Pyle’s “manly voice.” Pyle pupil Harvey Dunn remembered his teacher’s “far carrying voice” and his “deep and compelling laugh.” A 1909 interviewer said Pyle spoke “easily and swiftly...in curt sentences and jerky pauses.” Biographer Charles D. Abbott said, “Howard Pyle had a rich tenor voice, and considerable facility in using it, that made him very popular in musical circles.” Indeed, Pyle sang in public quite often, particularly in the choir of his church and in the chorus of the Tuesday Club. He also - in his twenties, at least - performed in amateur theatricals.

In my mind’s ear, I hear a clear, confident, steady stream of words issuing from Pyle’s mouth.

But artist James Edward Kelly remembered that when he met the young Howard Pyle in 1876, he “talked with a slight lisp.” And Pyle’s longtime friend, journalist Edward Noble Vallandigham, who befriended Pyle in the early 1880s, recalled that he had “a slight impediment of speech.”

Pyle himself echoed Vallandigham’s unfortunately vague description at least twice: in 1895, when invited to do a reading of his works, Pyle begged off, blaming “somewhat of an impediment in my speech that would perhaps make it unpleasant and awkward both for myself and my hearers.” Refusing a similar invitation that same year, he confessed, “I have unfortunately at times a slight impediment in my speech that might in such a public reading be unpleasant, both to you and to myself.”

So was it - like Kelly said - merely a “slight lisp”? Perhaps, but when asked in a 1982 tape-recorded interview if her father read aloud from books, Eleanor Pyle Crichton (1894-1984) said, “No, he never read. He stuttered.”

Whatever it was, though, the “impediment” didn’t always stop Pyle from singing, acting, teaching, or, for that matter, from more formal speaking engagements. At the same time that he was turning down the above mentioned offers, he was finding his way as a teacher, starting with lectures on “Practical Illustration” to students at the Drexel Institute in the fall of 1894. And it wasn’t long before Pyle did begin to accept invitations to speak: in 1897 he delivered the commencement address at Delaware College, and in the first decade of the 20th Century he spoke before the Society of Arts and Crafts of Boston, the School of Fine Arts of Yale University, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Franklin Inn Club in Philadelphia, Milwaukee-Downer College, the Irvington Athenaeum (in Indianapolis), the Art Students’ League of New York, the National Academy of Design, the American Institute of Architects - and so on - not to mention his ten years’ worth of almost weekly “composition lectures” to students and guests at Wilmington and Chadd’s Ford.

Somewhere along the line, it seems that Pyle overcame his “impediment,” or at least he became less self-conscious about it. Perhaps his conviction to the cause of raising illustration from what he described as a “discredited handicraft” to a distinctly American school of art had something to do with it.

Howard Pyle’s Birthplace: A Crack in the Case

Two years ago I talked about why I believed that Howard Pyle was born in a house on Market Street, between Eighth and Ninth Streets, in Wilmington, Delaware. You can read about it and see some pictures here. Yesterday, a new piece of evidence - which seems to support my theory - caught my eye:
 

The most intriguing thing about this is that it was written by Pyle’s sister, Katharine. It appeared in her syndicated history, “The Story of Delaware,” in the magazine section of The Sunday Morning Star - a.k.a. The Delmarva Star - on November 9, 1924.

Although there are some problems with the piece (particularly with some of the dates), I’m inclined to take her statement - “Howard Pyle was born in an old house on Market street in Wilmington” - at its word. And, despite its flaws, this brief biography of her brother - with whom she had a somewhat conflicted relationship - is worth reading, so I’ve quoted it in full, below.

Of course, Katharine Pyle was no mean artist and writer herself, and she’s presently the focus of an extensive exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum.

THE STORY OF DELAWARE
by Katharine Pyle

Conclusion of Chapter on “Famous Men”

HOWARD PYLE
1853-1912 [sic 1911]

Howard Pyle was born in an old house on Market street in Wilmington, and it was in Wilmington the greater part of his life was spent.

Even as a child he showed a talent for drawing. The blank places and margins in his school books were filled with sketches, the most of them made in hours when he was supposed to be studying.

At eighteen [sic sixteen] he was sent to an art school in Philadelphia and a few years later he set off for New York to seek his fortune.

He was ambitious to support himself, and after he once began to earn money he made up his mind that he would not ask his father for further help. At times he had scarcely enough money to buy art materials or pay for his models, but he held to his determination, and before long his name became known as a rising illustrator. Publishers spoke of him as one of the most promising among the younger artists.

In 1878 [sic 1879] he came back to Wilmington to live and soon after he married. Already his reputation as an artist had been made, but his fame as a writer came later. He had written quite a number of verses and short stories but his book of “Robin Hood” was the beginning of his real reputation in that line. As years went on still other books were written, - “The Wonder Clock.” “Otts [sic Otto] of the Silver Hand,” “The Garden Behind the Moon,” “Twilight Land” and others. The last of all was the King Arthur Series. All these are now child classics and are rich in illustrations done by his own hand.

Some of his tales were dictated to his stenographer as he stood at his easel painting, but he found this double work wearisome after a time, and in his later years he never attempted it.

He loved to have someone read to him as he drew or painted. Hour after hour was spent by his stenographer in reading about tales of pirates or adventure: or perhaps she read to him one of Trollope’s novels, or a book of Swedenborg, for he was of the Swedenborgian religion, and the influence of his belief was shown, not only in his life, but in his pictures and writings as well.

His work hours were long. They did not always end with the daylight. Sometimes he worked at home in the evenings over some delicate bit of pen-and-ink or a wash drawing while his wife read to him.

Besides his illustrating and writing he did a number of mural decorations.

The amount of work he turned out was enormous; in all he produced over three thousand pictures and decorations.

In 1893 [sic 1894] he was asked to teach a class in illustration at the Drexel Institute, Philadelphia. It was the first class of its kind in this country and proved a great success.

Out of it grew Mr. Pyle’s Summer School at Chadd’s Ford.

Later he gave up his classes at the Drexel. He built studios about his own for some of his students; and others who had followed him to Wilmington for the sake of his teaching, rented rooms or buildings near by.

Many of the men and women who studied under him in those years are among the most famous illustrators of the day.

In 1911 [sic 1910] Mr. Pyle set sail with his family, intending to spend a year or more abroad. But from this journey he never returned. He died in Florence the following year.

Since then a great number of his pictures have been bought by the people of Wilmington. A society called “The Fine Arts Society of Wilmington” [sic The Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts] was formed with the express purpose of keeping them together, caring for them and exhibiting them at certain times.

Now a special room in the Wilmington Public Library has been built for them, and there they have been hung and can be seen any time. It is probably the largest collection there is of any one man’s work, and it stands as a greater memorial to the art of Howard Pyle than the most imposing monument that could have been built.

Howard Pyle Slept Here, Part 3

Yes, Howard Pyle slept here. He also worked here, about ten years before this photograph was taken.

The address is (well, was) 788 Broadway at Tenth Street in New York City, right next to James Renwick’s Grace Church. Fleischmann’s Vienna Model Bakery was on the street level, and, as Pyle’s friend James Edward Kelly recalled: “The upper floors of the building were full of little artist studios, like tiny cocoons, in which young artists tried to work out their daydreams.”

Pyle moved from 1267 Broadway (at 32nd Street) and into Room 31 of 788 Broadway on or about November 1, 1878. He wrote to his mother two days later:

I have looked all over New York and have seen all the studios that are to be seen and am sure that I have one of the nicest, pleasantest rooms in the city. It has a fine north light and two side lights looking out on Broadway. It is only two blocks above Scribners’ office and I can now go down to Harpers’ and return in half an hour, instead of its taking me a half day to complete the journey and its business as formerly. There is steam heat in the room and running water and altogether it is very satisfactory. The rent asked for it last year was thirty-five dollars a month. I have got it for twenty-three, and an allowance for fixing it up, calcimining the walls, etc.

Another friend, artist William Henry Shelton, remembered in his 1918 history of the Salmagundi Club (which met on Friday nights at Science Hall on Eighth Street, opposite the Mercantile Library, from February 1878 to October 1879):

Howard Pyle was one of the popular members of that period when a member’s popularity depended largely on the quality of his work. He was usually too busy to attend the meetings, but it was only a step from Eighth Street to the studio building adjoining Grace Church, and a committee of one was frequently appointed to bring him down. Sometimes he would be found writing, but more often with a sheet of Whatman’s paper on his easel moving backward and forward before a wet drawing by the light of a student-lamp, and not to be disturbed or enticed from his work by threat or persuasion.

(In his 1927 history of the club, Shelton presented this slightly variant picture: “There was a tarrying place at Science Hall in Eighth Street when it was usually my job to entice Howard Pyle to the meeting from his studio next to Grace Church. He would be found with a kerosene lamp on the floor, stretching a sheet of Whatman paper, or otherwise engaged, and not to be enticed.”)

But Pyle didn’t remain there long: it seems that he only took out a six-month lease on place - from November 1, 1878, to May 1, 1879 - and left the city when it was up. At any rate, the New York Herald of May 12, 1879, reported that “Howard Pyle has gone to Wilmington, Del., we regret to hear, to stay.”

It’s interesting to note that Pyle’s posthumously-published short story, “Huntford’s Fair Nihilist” (Harper’s Monthly, June 1913), centers on a young artist, based on Pyle himself:

He had come to New York from a provincial city two years before, with a great deal of talent and some excellent letters of introduction.

His talents found him plenty of work, his letters of introduction admitted him into pleasant homes, and his poverty spurred him on to those vehement efforts that were afterward crowned with so great a success.

Huntford used to breakfast and lunch at the old Budapest Bakery, where they had the best coffee and rolls in New York.

It’s a short leap from the Vienna Bakery to the “Budapest Bakery.” And another character in the story, Frederick Vollmer, an old German “Heraldic Designer,” was likely an amalgam of Joseph Vollmering (1810-1887), the German-born painter, and one “Rudolph B. Irontraut,” heraldic artist (also German-born, c.1822), who were both at 788 Broadway when the 1880 U.S. Census was taken, just over a year after Pyle had left.

The building, of course, is long gone, but Grace Church is still very much there. Some more details can be found here.

A Friend Remembers Howard Pyle

Howard Pyle grinning in Italy, a few months before his death in 1911

Almost immediately after Howard Pyle died - 100 years ago today - his friends and acquaintances began to record their thoughts about him. I’ve always been fond of one particular reminiscence written and published on the very day of Pyle’s death in the Boston Evening Transcript. The author was the journalist Edward Noble Vallandigham, who worked at the Wilmington newspaper Every Evening, The Day of Baltimore, the New York Mail & Express, etc., and who was a fellow member (with Pyle) of the Quill and Grill Club and Pyle’s “esteemed friend of many years standing”. He later wrote the book Delaware and the Eastern Shore: Some Aspects of a Peninsula Pleasant and Well Beloved (1922). A few of Vallandigham’s details aren’t quite right, but, overall, his portrait of Pyle captures something a little different than we see in, say, the reminiscences of Pyle’s students...


HOWARD PYLE

When I first made the acquaintance of Howard Pyle, back in the middle seventies of the last century, he was a full-faced young man three or four years under thirty, and already, after a period of apprenticeship to severe economy, in New York, married, living at Wilmington, and earning $5000 a year as illustrator and writer. He was a simple and extremely attractive young man, six feet tall, full chested, broad shouldered, and well featured, with a fine cranium, frank blue eyes and a ready smile. His home was in a big old house in a part of the city once fashionable, if anything in Quaker Wilmington deserved that description, but then beginning to be deserted for suburban and semi-urban quarters.

----

It was my good fortune soon after making Pyle’s acquaintance to set up house keeping with two college mates, both struggling young lawyers, one, Lewis C. Vandegrift, afterward highly successful and greatly beloved, but unhappily now dead more than ten years, and Charles M. Curtis of New England ancestry, who has since become chancellor of Delaware. To our extremely modest menage came a group of very good fellows of whom Pyle was one, and his house was a place of resort for our little household and some of our guests, notably Leighton Howe, a brother of M. A. DeW. Howe of this city, and a most delightful companion with whom one could have the liveliest kind of quarrel upon any topic under heaven.

As Pyle prospered in his work he built a studio in the upper part of the city, just off Delaware avenue, an agreeable residence street, and to this studio we were all invited from time to time for picnic suppers and the like. Pyle had as manservant about the studio an extremely black and altogether idle Negro boy named Ferdinand, and for thirty years he was accustomed to quote as an exquisite witticism my foolish inquiry as to whether Ferdinand were worth two in the bush. We were all rather young then.

For reasons not explicable upon any theory of social comfort Pyle then summered at Rehoboth, Del., a resort as hot as Tophet and infested with mosquitoes. Its sole attraction was a good bathing beach and a startlingly realistic mirage. The cottage, which he shared with his mother-in-law, the sweetest imaginable old lady, whose Quaker bringing up did not prevent her from offering welcome liquid refreshment after the bath, was the scene of a hospitality almost recklessly prodigal. Later Pyle abandoned Rehoboth and summered at Chadds Ford on the Brandywine, where he established a summer school of design, and still later he removed his place of residence to Delaware avenue, and enlarged his studio so as to provide room for his pupils, who had increased in number and would have overwhelmed him had he chosen to accept all comers.

The establishment of his school of illustration grew out of a long cherished plan to aid young men of promise toward realizing their artistic ideals. To this school nobody was admitted who did not give promise of real talent, and who was unwilling to devote himself solely to the work in hand. Pyle made no charge for his services as teacher, but permitted pupils to pay for the use of the studio and materials. The man who failed of industry was ruthlessly sent away, but the worker with real talent got as much of the teacher’s time as he chose to ask. Gradually Pyle gathered about him at Wilmington a little group of illustrators who earned their living by the art he had done so much to teach them, and who were privileged to claim his continued advice and criticism.

----

When Thomas F. Bayard went abroad as ambassador to the Court of St. James, he rented to Pyle his big, queer old mansion on the outskirts of Wilmington, the house in which Myra Clark Gaines, the New Orleans claimant, was born. Here, as in all his other homes, Pyle exercised a generous hospitality, and the place with its wide porches, big airy rooms, ample grounds and wide prospect was well suited to such a purpose. Pyle found it, however, a most expensive place of residence, as the terms of his rental bound him to necessary repairs which required a considerable outlay. A few years ago, by which time Pyle was earning a large income by his indefatigable work of various kinds, he was tempted by an extravagant offer for S. S. McClure to become art editor of McClure’s Magazine. He passed nearly half his time in New York looking after his work for the magazine, and on meeting him at the City Club soon after his employment began, I found him full of enthusiasm in his undertaking, and of ardent admiration for Mr. McClure. Not long after, however, news came that the arrangement had been discontinued. I fancy Pyle had become too firmly set in his own views of artistic propriety, to work well for another, and the exile from home, which he dearly loved, must have gone hard with a man of his temperament.

It was characteristic of Pyle to become greatly absorbed in ideas, projects and somewhat in persons. In religion he was a convinced Swedenborgian, and consequently much of a mystic. At one time he became deeply interested in the Single Tax, but he long ago ceased to care for Mr. George’s ideas. Private theatricals were one of his passions, and he gave himself to this amusement with something like abandon. He became some years ago an enthusiastic admirer of Mr. Roosevelt, and was several times entertained at the White House. Upon one of these occasions he met Mr. Taft, then of the cabinet, heard him talk of the Panama Canal, and came away deeply impressed with his easy mastery of a great subject. “He seemed,” said Pyle, “as familiar with that vast undertaking as I should be with the laying of a drain in my back yard.”

----

The years dealt most kindly with Pyle, and in his middle fifties he was one of the most delightful looking of men. His head, indeed, was gray where it was not bald, but his face was rosy, his carriage erect, and his expression one of ripe benevolence and delightful openness. When I last saw him I sat by as he worked at a picture in colors, and we talked as he painted, a double occupation not unusual with him. It was on this occasion that he laid down the axiom, “If your art cannot be great, make it useful.” This, I think, gave a hint of his real ambition, which was to be a creative painter in oils. His visit to Italy was with a view to the study of Italian art at first hand, and had he been spared a dozen years we might have seen a fruitful harvest from that new undertaking. His death leaves a great gap in the ranks of American illustrators, and he is a loss as well to American letters that will be especially felt by thousands of his youthful admirers. Pyle was a most interesting personality, a man of singular sweetness, purity and sanity, the relentless pursuer of his own best ideals, and a worker of prodigious and tireless energy.

What Did Howard Pyle Die Of?

What did Howard Pyle die of? Most contemporary newspapers reported that it was “heart failure” or “heart disease”. The more common notion - via those closer to the Pyle family - is that it was “kidney trouble” or Bright’s Disease - and his known symptoms are consistent with that diagnosis.

And still another, also kidney-related cause of death can be found in the “Report of the Death of an American Citizen” sent by the American Consular Service at Florence, Italy, to the U.S. State Department. This document - signed, by the way, by Leo J. Keena (1878-1967), the American Consul, and an acquaintance of the Pyles - said it was “uric acid poisoning”.

Coincidentally, Pyle’s brother Clifford died at 53 of “a kidney affliction” in 1910 and his brother Walter died at 59 of Bright’s Disease in 1919. So perhaps a genetic component was involved.

Howard Pyle on Death

“To me Death is a most interesting change to look forward to and the other life is as certain a thing to me as the passing from one room to another room - except that it means just such a vital and radical change as that of a seed that quits its dead casing of earth to become a tree in the sunshine and air of the area.”

- Howard Pyle to Richard Watson Gilder, October 5, 1892

Hot Air at Howard Pyle’s Studio

From the Sunday Morning Star of Wilmington, Delaware, November 4, 1883:

William Pyle Dies in Boston

It’s the anniversary of the death of William Pyle - Howard’s father. He suffered a stroke while on a business trip and died in a Boston hospital on October 15, 1892. The date of his death seems to be in some dispute, but this date has been corroborated by Massachusetts and Delaware records.

He is seen here in a photo taken in 1883 (or maybe 1884). On his knee is his grandson, Sellers.

Howard Pyle’s Reading List

Headband for A History of New York (The Grolier Club, 1886) by Howard Pyle

“I asked Mr. Pyle for a list of books he would recommend to me to read this winter and he gave me the following saying that when I had read these to come for more.”

So wrote Allen Tupper True to his mother on October 13, 1902. Pyle’s reading list included these titles, which are all still readily available:

By Nathaniel Hawthorne...

• Twice-Told Tales (1837)
• Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)

By Washington Irving...

• The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., (1819)
• A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809)

By William Dean Howells...

• The Rise of Silas Lapham
• The Lady of the Aroostook (1879)

Not really hifalutin stuff, but True later explained, “Mr. Pyle’s list of books is rather queer but he seemed to think I would like and need light literature in connection with the grind I shall have at the studio.”

Of course, Pyle knew Howells personally and they collaborated on Stops of Various Quills, published in 1895.

Pyle also knew Hawthorne’s son, Julian, who interviewed him for an article in 1907. And his first (or second) known book illustration - in McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader (1879) - was for an excerpt from “A Rill from the Town Pump” from Twice-Told Tales. The Brandywine River Museum now owns the original art (but I could have, if I hadn’t chickened out when it was offered to me. I still kick myself.). Also, in 1900, Pyle supervised the illustration of Twice-Told Tales by his students for Complete Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co..

And the illustration shown above is one of three Pyle made for the Grolier Club’s 1886 edition of The History of New York.

A Lost and Found Pyle

With the exception of sketches, doodles, and embellished inscriptions in books, the bulk of Howard Pyle’s pictures have been published at one time or another, so “lost” ones of any importance are exceedingly rare. But I just found one.

After my Cass Gilbert post, I was looking around for information about his house in Ridgefield, Connecticut. In a letter of August 28, 1907, to Pyle, Gilbert wrote that he had just bought the property. “It was an old tavern in the revolutionary time and is really a charming little place,” he said, adding that he didn’t plan to alter it, only repair it and restore the garden to the way it had been in the 1700s. “It is just the sort of thing that you would like, and we have said again and again that if we can get you, we want you to come there and visit us just as soon as we can give decent accommodations to a guest.”

I don’t yet know if Pyle took up Gilbert’s offer, but the place has since become the Keeler Tavern Museum & Garden House. And on one of the pages of their website I was surprised to see this tiny reproduction of a picture of Cass’s wife, Julia Finch Gilbert.

Portrait of Julia Finch Gilbert by Howard Pyle (c.1908-10)

Some years ago, the Gilberts’ granddaughter gave the 28.5 x 34.5" portrait to the museum, where it now hangs in the Cass Gilbert Dining Room. The museum informed me that “We were told Mrs. Gilbert did not like the way her hands looked in the painting so the lower part of the portrait was cut off along with the artist's signature.” But surely this is Howard Pyle’s work.

Fortunately, there’s documentation to prove it. That which I’ve been able to read (so far) suggests that Pyle started the painting sometime in 1908, when, perhaps, the Pyle-Gilbert friendship was at its most intimate. Cass Gilbert said in a December 22nd letter of that year:

I am tremendously interested in the outcome of the portrait. Mrs. Gilbert tells me that you expect her to come down again for a day some time in the near future, just when I do not know, and that after that my curiosity may be satisfied but not until then.

But Pyle seems to have let it slide: in a letter of March 22, 1910, Gilbert begged, “I do wish you would send me the portrait just as it is and some time when you can come and visit us for a week or two you can touch it up. It must not be allowed to interfere with your work...” He pointed out that the “limitations of Mrs. Gilbert’s wardrobe are such that I think she feels the lack of a hat and gown which she left in Wilmington” - and he asked Pyle to return them.

Drawing from letters I haven’t yet looked at, the new Pyle biography also discusses the portrait and indicates that the plan was for Pyle to paint it “for a commission determined by [Mrs. Pyle and Mrs. Gilbert]”:

Ever generous, Pyle said he preferred doing the work for free. Insecure about his abilities at portraiture, Pyle complained that he was unaccustomed to the genre. Once the portrait was completed, Pyle felt he might not have captured Mrs. Gilbert’s likeness, telling her husband she was “really a very difficult subject to paint.” Self-effacingly, Pyle suggested Gilbert destroy it if it was unsatisfactory and “get some better fellow” to undertake another painting.

Needless to say, I’d been wondering where the picture was since first reading about it in Gilbert’s letters some 15 or so years ago. But I had no luck in trying to track it down. I also had no clue as to what it would look like: Pyle really wasn’t a portrait painter, and his self-portrait of 1906 (at the National Academy of Design) isn’t particularly notable. This painting, however, is great. It’s so much better, stronger, and more interesting than I thought it would be. And even if it was, indeed, cut down, it still works. Pyle’s ever-inventive placement of bold colors and lights and darks is just terrific. I can’t wait to see it in person.

Incidentally, I showed it to one of Pyle’s great-granddaughters and her husband remarked that “Mrs Gilbert looks like a pirate!” She does bear a resemblance to this one - among others...

“The Buccaneer Was a Picturesque Fellow” by Howard Pyle (1905)

Howard Pyle Slept Here, Part 2

On September 9, 1911, Howard Pyle’s sons Theodore (22) and Howard Jr. (20) sailed on the S. S. Canopic from Genoa, Italy, bound for Boston and, ultimately, their fall semester at Yale. The next day, apparently, his sons Godfrey (15) and Wilfrid (13) took the train up to their school near Lausanne, Switzerland. “We shall be cut down then to the feminine skeleton of our family,” Pyle had said colorfully, if not a little morbidly, in anticipation of their departure.

A few days later - perhaps even one hundred years ago today! - Pyle and his wife, Anne, and their daughters Phoebe (24) and Eleanor (17), and his secretary, Gertrude Brincklé, went to Siena for a two-week stay at the Pensione Chiusarelli - seen here in a postcard of that vintage. (The place, by the way, is now the newly restored, three-star Hotel Chiusarelli - in case you’d like to sleep there, too.)

It was a welcome change for Pyle, who had grown to despise his summer residence, the Villa Torricella, in the hills above Florence. “It was more nasty than I can make you understand,” he said in a letter to Stanley Arthurs, after itemizing the “great high walls” surrounding it and the “very rough and very steep” roads to it that “were so filthy that you had to keep your eyes straight before you so as to see where you stepped,” as well as the long stretch of hot, dry weather and his own bouts of “sickness and blues.” In fact, Pyle confided, “I would rather have ever so sharp an illness than such dreadful mental depression as overwhelmed me.” In escaping to Siena, however, the family “all became prosperous and happy again.”

Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building Confession

Ever since he finished “The Landing of Carteret” for Cass Gilbert’s Essex County Court House, Howard Pyle hoped to get another mural commission for one of the architect’s buildings. It never happened. Despite their personal friendship - and the strings Gilbert pulled - their professional connection effectively ended when the painting went up in Newark in March 1907.

While idling in Italy some four years later, Pyle sent Gilbert the occasional, gloomy missive about his health and his prospects as a muralist. “If only some one of the libraries which you are building wanted decoration, I really think I could now make something of some account in the world,” he wrote on April 4, 1911. “But I have not yet been asked to do anything.”

Gilbert had bigger - or taller - fish to fry. “For the last year my time has been very much taken up by the skyscraper problem,” he wrote to Pyle on August 29, 1911. The skyscraper in question was the Woolworth Building, which, at that point, had “not yet risen above the sidewalk level.” The contractors, however, promised to have 55 stories up by January 1, 1912...

It will be a miracle if they do. The whole thing has been handled in such a way that we have been in a perpetual series of rushes for over a year and not until we had nearly completed three different sets of designs, each larger and higher than the one before it, did we finally get really under way and then in not less than ninety days we had to make the plans of a structure which will be, for the time at least, as advertised, the highest in the world. It is too bad I could not have had all the time that was spent on preliminary work to develop the final design and make the best of it, however, we have got a fine plan and I think a very interesting exterior. I do not like to put down in writing what I think about doing work so rapidly, for not only antiquity but posterity would stand aghast at the extraordinary proposition.

Unluckily for Gilbert, his words live on in his own copy of his letter to Pyle, now at the New-York Historical Society.

Luckily, though, the building lives on, too.

“I saw a many ‘gruesome’ sights”

“The stout little old gentleman who ate four fish-balls for breakfast on Sunday”

How better to charm a woman than by drawing an old man about to vomit? That was Howard Pyle’s tactic, at least, in a letter he wrote to Miss Alice Hannum Cresson on August 19, 1875:

Wilmington

Aug 19th 1875

Dear Miss Alice:

Now ma am the question is am I or am I not to be forgiven for my appearant neglect of your kind permission to write to you. Before the court decides let me be heard in a little excuse “iv it be plazen to yus mum [?]”. Now the fact is that immediately upon my return home I received orders to prepare myself ‘instanter’ for a business trip to the north so you can easily imagen that I must have been much hurried to get off in reasonable time.

I arrived home on Monday or rather Tuesday last at half past one o’clock at night, rather fagged out to tell the truth; having travelled about thirteen hundred miles (and all at night at that) the foregoing week. However I am now as you perceive in my normal state of vavicious brilliancy - “Richard’s himself again!” in fact.

Boston was the last city I visited before I returned home and from there I came to Philadelphia by ocean. Ah Miss Alice in two days of ocean travel I saw a many “gruesome” sights - old gentleman that would ever and anon dash frantically to the edge of the boat where they would stand with bodies that heaved and swayed with the force of some internal conflict between breakfast and stomach. The wail of little children and cries of suffering women whilst the stewardess ran hither and thither with a baisin in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other - no ma am I was not sea-sick.

This little sketch represents the stout little old gentleman who ate four fish-balls for breakfast on Sunday.

[drawing of man, 7/8 x 3/4" - see above]

But enough of this “fal-lal.”

I saw Spencer this evening. He tells me that he has received a letter from Miss Sallie inviting us both up to Consho. next Saturday. Most unfortunately I have sundry little engagements for that day; while Saturday week Spencer is engaged; however on Saturday two weeks weather permitting and provided it suits you we shall do ourselves the pleasure of visiting you.

I suppose Spencer has told you all about our departure from Maryland. How I scarcely had time to buy my segars and ticket and to dash off a few agonized lines of parting to Miss Smith and at the last moment to post your letters almost forgetting my valise in my hurry. We were both upon the platform of course to catch a last lingering look at our lady friends at Mansion Farm and were duly gratified.

I enclose an illustration of Shakspeare - “a poor thing but mine own” - applicable to this peach and watermelon season [enclosure missing]. Please give my respects to your father and mother and the rest of my Consho. friends and believe me as ever -

Very Respectfully Yours

Howard Pyle

May I hope to hear from you soon in answer to this my first letter since my return from Maryland?

I should note that although Pyle dated the letter “Aug 19th” sometimes he got his dates wrong, plus the envelope (see below) was postmarked 10 p.m. August 20th, so it’s possible he wrote it on that day.

I’ve posted a couple of things regarding “Miss Alice” already, but here’s a quick review:

When the 22-year-old Pyle wrote to Alice Hannum Cresson, 26, she was living with her parents, Walter and Alice (Hannum) Cresson, and sisters, Anna and Sarah (or Sallie), in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. She and Pyle were cousins by marriage - Alice’s maternal aunt, Hannah Hannum (1817-1896), was the widow of Pyle’s maternal uncle, John Painter (1824-1865) - so they may have known each other since childhood.

First, regarding “iv it be plazen to yus mum”: I’ve been squinting at that phrase for the last fifteen years. “It be” and “to” were clear, but the other parts I thought, at various times, were “played to your music” or “muse” and “plague to your name” and so on. All nonsense. But I think I’m on the right track now. It really can’t be anything but “plazen” - that’s Pyle’s “p” and “z,” etc. - and if we say it with an “Irish” accent, it translates to “it be pleasing to.” Since Pyle was familiar with Irish character songs and plays, this seems likely. I might be misreading the first word “iv” (or “if”), but Pyle also was apt to add extra bits to his letterforms and not dot his “i”s consistently. “To yus mum” - i.e. “to you, ma’am” - is iffy (or ivvy), but I don’t know what else it could be. Any takers?

But what else does this letter show us, apart from Pyle’s earthy sense of humor - and that he sometimes smoked “segars”?

Well, we see that Pyle was a mediocre speller, but he knew that: “I was never a good hand at spelling,” he admitted years later. He also knew his “Shakspeare” - sort of: “a poor thing but mine own” is a common misquotation of “an ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own” from As You Like It (Act 5, Scene 4). Incidentally, Pyle also used the phrase to “modestly” describe his fairy-tales in an 1889 letter: “But you know what Touchstone says - ‘A poor thing, a poor thing, but mine own!’” Meanwhile, “Richard’s himself again!” comes from Act 5, Scene 3 of Colley Cibber’s Richard III.

“Spencer,” it turns out, was Willard Spenser, born July 7, 1852 (or later), in Cooperstown, New York. He moved to Wilmington in 1873 and in 1875 was living at 1229 Tatnall Street with his mother, Mary, and brother, Claude. All three taught music. Spenser had early musical talent and composed his first waltz at age 7. In 1886, “The Little Tycoon” - for which he wrote both the music and the libretto - premiered in Philadelphia and became the first successful light opera by an American composer. By then it seems that he and Pyle had drifted apart, though later they were fellow members of the Franklin Inn Club.

“Mansion Farm,” as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, was the Owings Mills, Maryland home of Pyle’s (and Alice’s) aunt and uncle, Sarah and Milton Painter. I recently learned, though, that the place - also known as ULM and built by Samuel Owings himself - was the focus of controversy some 15 years ago, when a developer sneakily demolished it. A more full, interesting, and illustrated history of it can be found here.

But perhaps the most intriguing thing about this letter is what it reveals about Pyle’s otherwise murky involvement in his father’s leather business. The 1875-76 Wilmington city directory (published in June 1875) lists William Pyle as a “leather dealer” and Howard Pyle as an “artist.” The latter description may have been wishful thinking at that point, but it’s plain that Howard’s duties went beyond clerking in an office and that he acted - well, once - as a sort of traveling salesman, going by train - and boat - to visit scattered customers. This is, at least, exactly what his father did, especially in the 1880s, after his younger sons, Clifford and Walter, had taken the reins of the family enterprise.

One more thing: chief among the Pyles’ products (eventually, but quite possibly in the 1870s, too) was leather for bookbinding. Their clients, naturally, would have included publishers. In fact, according to Alpheus Sherwin Cody - who interviewed Pyle in 1894 - Roswell Smith, President of Scribner & Company, “was a friend of [Pyle’s] father.” Why would a Delawarean leather dealer become friendly with a New York publisher?

I wonder, therefore, if this as-yet hypothetical connection to the publishing world was an “in” - or the “in” - that Pyle successfully exploited in 1876, after writing up his Chincoteague experiences...

Howard Pyle Slept Here, Part 1

Southwest corner of Seventh and West Streets, Wilmington, Delaware (1994)

Okay, Howard Pyle may have slept here.

I was going through some old files and came across this photo. It was taken by Paul Preston Davis one day in July 1994 when we were tracking down Pyle’s different residences in and around Wilmington, Delaware. Many - most - were gone, pulled down years earlier, but a couple still stood.

The poor old building shown here might be one of the survivors. That is, if it was erected more than 140 years ago: it looks it, to me, despite the more recent portico and newer structure added to the back. It may also have been a one-family dwelling divided into two, at some point. It sits (provided it hasn’t since been destroyed) on the southwest corner of Seventh and West Streets in Wilmington.

The Pyle family moved to this location from their second house in the country, called “Evergreen” or “Evergreens” on the Philadelphia Pike, in the late 1860s. Actually, the exact year may have been 1869, if we can trust Howard Pyle’s statement, “Nearly all of my life up to sixteen years was spent in the country.”

The Pyles’ time here corresponded with the three years that Howard spent studying art under F. A. Van der Wielen in Philadelphia. They may even have chosen to return to Wilmington proper to make Howard’s commute easier - unless, of course, he lived in Philadelphia when classes were in session, since he also said:

At the age of 16 I left home to be a student at a private art school in Philadelphia. The school was kept by a man who won a gold medal at Antwerp, the center, perhaps, of the most technical art in Europe. I remained three years in Philadelphia... [emphasis mine]

But young Howard would still have spent long periods at his parents’ place. In fact, we know for sure that he was there on July 11, 1870, when the Ninth U.S. Federal Census was taken. On that day, the household included the immediate Pyle family (William, Margaret, Howard, Clifford, Walter, and Katharine) plus some others:

• Frances Augustine Eyre (born 1848), Howard Pyle’s first cousin
• Hannah James Churchman (born 1794), Howard Pyle’s great-aunt
• Edward Churchman Painter (born 1846), another first cousin
• Catherine Ragan [sic], an Irish-born housemaid, aged 28

And it was probably here that the 18-year-old Howard drew the masthead for Every Evening, which first appeared in print on September 4, 1871.

In 1872, however, the family packed up and relocated yet again, to yet another house on Market Street - their third of four - and the sixth home Howard Pyle lived in before the age of 20.

Some Thoughts on Howard Pyle: Imagining an American School of Art

My once-pristine copy of Howard Pyle: Imagining an American School of Art by Jill P. May and Robert E. May is now full of grubby scribbles and marginalia. So... what do I think?

Frankly, I was hoping for something, well, fatter: more thorough, more comprehensive. Then again, I’m a glutton for Pyle data, and that wasn’t necessarily the authors’ aim. Still, at 206 pages (plus notes and index) it’s a relatively slim book - plus the price is high and the illustrations are few.

Also, I would have preferred a more rigidly chronological structure, if only to better capture the arc of Pyle’s multifaceted life. The authors’ transitions often feel too abrupt or arbitrary to me, the arrangement of details and events sometimes seems jumbled, and there are notable gaps and omissions. But no doubt the “Pylean timeline” in my head holds too much sway: I have too many preconceived notions of where things “ought to be” and how much attention they should get.

That being said, the authors - drawing from countless previously untapped sources - do bring many new things about Pyle to light - and they put them into broader historical context than has been the norm. They also confront issues which Charles D. Abbott’s and Henry C. Pitz’s hagiographies avoid...

Like Pyle’s seemingly contradictory attitudes toward his female students. The authors go far in dismantling the accusation that Pyle was a just cold-hearted sexist when he chose to bar women from his school. Rather, they explain that he consistently (and not so typically for that era) nurtured and championed talent in whomever he saw it; yet, time and again, he noticed his female trainees’ talents - and his investment in developing them - stifled by “marriage possibilities and domestic responsibilities.” Thus, since the ever-practical Pyle “did not want to expend great effort teaching students who might drop out of the field,” he came to focus his teaching energies on men.

The authors are also unafraid to tackle Pyle’s views on race. To a Pyle enthusiast, this topic is troubling: he was, after all, a privileged, paternalistic white man from a border state, and his writings contain some insensitive, unreconstructed, and - yes - racist things. But the authors show that, despite his unfortunate comments, Pyle was usually (though not always) “color-blind” when depicting black people in his illustrations. They also bring up the surprising point that Pyle essentially made an “endorsement of racial equality in heaven” in his most personal and emotionally-charged book, The Garden Behind the Moon. Well, equal rights “in heaven” are one thing, in real life they’re another, and while the authors are not apologists for Pyle’s prejudices, they at least add useful new twists to the conversation.

They also put Pyle’s often inscrutable Swedenborgianism - and how it influenced his life and work - into sharper, yet nuanced focus. And - as the title of the book promises - they deal at considerable length with Pyle’s messianic, if quixotic, quest to generate a staunchly “American” school of art. Indeed, this is the book’s overarching theme. And even though Pyle’s mission pretty much failed, the authors devote a chapter to demonstrate how, in myriad ways, his legacy has lived on.

Of course, as with any ambitious project borne out of fugitive data culled from far-flung archives and forgotten publications, a number of factual errors are present. And while these may only be noticeable to, say, a pedantic Pyle zealot, I feel obliged to highlight some in an ersatz “errata slip”:

• Page x: Richard Wayne Lykes wrote “Howard Pyle, Teacher of Illustration” in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, not William W. Hummel (who wrote the article immediately preceding Lykes’s in that same issue)
• Page 3: Pyle only said that he lived in the “quaint old house of the colonial period” (known as “Green Hill”), not that he was born there. In fact, his father only purchased the property in August or September 1854. (See more on Pyle’s place of birth)
• Page 5: Pyle “confided to his friend” Edmund Clarence Stedman, not Richard Watson Gilder
• Page 9: Pyle actually “began his magazine career” with an illustration for his mother’s poem “The Reformer” in St. Nicholas (November 1875), not with “The Magic Pill” in Scribner’s Monthly (July 1876)
• Page 10: In 1876, Pyle roomed in the same building as The Misses Marshall’s School for Young Ladies at 250 West 38th Street in New York, not “Forty-eighth Street.” Granted, Pyle himself made this mistake in his scrapbook and in a 1903 interview, and then Abbott and Pitz took it on faith
• Page 17: Pyle brought a letter of introduction to the illustrator Frederick Stuart Church, not to “the renowned landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church”
• Page 26: “The Soldiering of Beniah Stidham” appeared in St. Nicholas for December 1892, not 1882
• Page 35: Library of Universal Adventure by Sea and Land, edited by William Dean Howells and Thomas Sergeant Perry (not “Thomas Sargeant”), merely reused a Pyle illustration from 1880. And in Pyle’s April 13, 1890, letter to Howells, he says, “now that I have the pleasure of your acquaintance” - which indicates that they hadn’t known each other long. Further evidence suggests that they may only have met in January 1890
• Page 47 and 120: Art editor Alexander W. Drake was not affiliated with any Scribner publications after 1881
• Page 49: Pyle did not create “a pamphlet of his own” in reaction to Henry Mills Alden’s God in His World, An Interpretation: some years after Pyle’s death, Merle Johnson made a transcription (which contains significant errors) of Pyle’s March 30, 1890, letter to Alden and published it in booklet form as “Sabbath Thoughts”
• Page 50: Pyle’s pen-and-ink drawings were for The One Hoss Shay (1891) and Dorothy Q (1892) by Oliver Wendell Holmes, not “a two-volume edition of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poems” (although Pyle did contribute two illustrations to a set of Whittier’s works published at about the same time)
• Pages 115-6 and 172: Pyle’s correspondent here is Henry Howard Harper of the Bibliophile Society, not J. Henry Harper of Harper & Brothers. Also, on page 125, it was Henry Howard Harper who asked the Pyles to dine at the hotel
• Page 122: Samuel L. Clemens wrote his laudatory letter to Pyle on January 1, 1903, after reading no more than three installments of the serialized Story of King Arthur in St. Nicholas, not “after receiving a complimentary copy” of the book, published the following November
• Page 157: Pyle could not have “produced a startling 20 percent of all the color illustrations appearing in Harper’s, Century and Scribner’s magazines between 1906 and 1910” because none of his work appeared in the latter two magazines during those years (but maybe I’ve misinterpreted the equation)
• Page 175 (and Note 68): Pyle did not work “on a mural, despite lacking any commission” in Italy: the “major ‘decoration’” valued at $15,000 which Pyle “had hoped to place” in the St. Louis Public Library was the one he had painted for his Wilmington home in 1903-05
• The color reproduction of “The Landing of Carteret” is of not of the mural itself, but of Pyle’s smaller, much less finished study

Regarding some of the letters quoted - and here Pyle’s “dreadful chirography” is much to blame:

• Page 39: Not drawl, but “crawl out from underneath the load”
• Page 49: Not pitching, but “fetching a pocket full of religion”
• Page 105: Pyle’s students did not give him “a chain made of real clam feet” but an “old claw-foot chair”

I also don’t understand the rationale of referring to women by their middle and last names - i.e. Bertha Corson Day is called “Corson Day” (not simply “Day”) and Ellen Bernard Thompson is “Bernard Thompson” - especially when it causes more confusion than, I guess, it’s meant to prevent. Take this oddly constructed passage on page 94:

Eventually, Bernard Thompson and Walter Pyle were married, and while he was alive, she became inactive, returning to her art career after his death. Corson Day would continue to exhibit at the Plastic Club for the next few years, but once she and Bates were married, her career goals ebbed. Corson Day and Bernard Thompson had romantic relationships and put their art careers aside to get married, though Corson Day would continue to exhibit at the Plastic Club for the next few years and Thompson would return to art career after her husband’s death.

But these are the extreme examples, and although I could identify other “misdatings” and misspellings and so on, I’ll stop here. Again, they are, I suppose, relatively insignificant - and irritating only to the lunatic fringe of Pyle fandom.

If it sounds like I’m being unduly hard on this book... I guess I am. My know-it-allness gets the better of me when I see inaccuracies perpetuated in print, and I’m probably too close to the subject to be truly objective. But, after stepping back a bit, I see the enormity of what the authors have accomplished.

Howard Pyle called himself a “plain man”; others described him as “simple.” Well, maybe. If anything, I’ve found him to be an extraordinarily complex person, and the astonishing breadth of his acquaintance and interests and creative output - together with the sad fact that the bulk of his personal papers have been scattered or lost - make boiling down his life into a manageable 200 pages a nearly impossible task. The authors have succeeded, however, in harnessing a lot of ornery material - and presenting it admirably.

Critical, perceptive, and well-researched writings about Pyle are rare: they would barely fill out a foot’s-worth of shelf-space. This book deserves a place among them. My nitpicking aside, Howard Pyle: Imagining an American School of Art is a huge leap forward in helping us understand who Pyle was, what inspired and motivated him, and where he fits into the history of art in America.