“No American Writer Can Come Within Touch of You”

Howard Pyle’s fondness for the writings of William Dean Howells is well documented - mostly in Pyle’s own correspondence. On October 30, 1895, Pyle wrote yet another glowing letter to his literary idol, mentor, and friend:

My wife and I are reading your Shaker story together. I was so much impressed with the first number that I sat down immediately and wrote Harry Harper what I so strongly felt - that it only added to my already formed opinion that no American writer can come within touch of you. The measure of your success lies far beyond the radius of the present into the vaster cycle of the future....

The first number of your story was startlingly true to nature, the succeeding numbers are charmingly idyllic.

“Your Shaker story” was “The Day of Their Wedding” which appeared in seven weekly installments (or “numbers”) in Harper’s Bazar between October 5 and November 16, 1895. And “Harry Harper” was J. Henry Harper, a friend of both Howells and Pyle, and a member of the publishing firm.

Pyle had, in fact, expressed a similar sentiment in a letter of February 26 that same year: “I do not of course know what are your present rewards of popularity but I feel very sure that you are writing for future readers.” Over the past century, however, Howells’ stock hasn’t performed quite as well as Pyle thought it would.

But now, future readers, why not read the novel yourselves and put Pyle’s assessment to the test?

Teddy Roosevelt Checks In With Mrs. Pyle

If you scroll through the Theodore Roosevelt Papers at the Library of Congress, you’ll find this kindly letter to Howard Pyle’s widow - written one hundred years ago today:

SAGAMORE HILL

Oyster Bay, N.Y., July 18, 1914.

My dear Mrs. Pyle:

Mrs. Roosevelt wrote you some time ago and had no answer. I am writing you now merely to find out how you are and how you are getting along. You know how I valued your husband, and I do wish to know a little bit how life is going with you.

Faithfully yours,

Theodore Roosevelt

Mrs. Howard Pyle,
Wilmington, Del.

When I went a-scrolling myself a long while back, I was unable to find a copy of Mrs. Roosevelt’s letter, or one Mrs. Pyle may or may not have sent in reply to this one. But I like the idea of the former president remembering his friend - and reaching out to his widow - that summer day.

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)

Pyle on Saint-Gaudens’s Sherman Monument

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

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

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

I could say more - but will not do so.

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

Pyle, Taft, and the Panama Canal

On January 5, 1905, Mr. and Mrs. Howard Pyle attended the Cabinet Dinner at the White House, where they dined on Harlequin Sandwiches, Potage Clear Green Turtle, Curled Celery, Terrapin à la Baltimore, Supreme of Chicken Villeroi with fresh mushrooms, Egyptian Quails à l'Estouffade - among other delicacies - and later stayed over night as guests of President Roosevelt.

Also at the dinner was Secretary of War William Howard Taft. After Taft was elected in 1908, Pyle wrote to congratulate him and said:

...I remember sitting at a small table in the White House with you and Mr. Cadwalader after the Cabinet dinner, and hearing you tell Mr. Cadwalader of your intentions concerning the Panama Canal. What you said to Mr. Cadwalader was said so simply and so unaffectedly that I carried away with me the impression that you were one of the strongest men in the world.

Pyle told others of his encounter with Taft that night - Edward Noble Vallandigham, for one, recalled of his friend Pyle:

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.”

Pyle’s enthusiasm for Taft - which seems to have been kindled 108 years ago tonight - eventually led him to provide some last minute, but apparently invaluable assistance to Taft’s 1908 campaign.

But more on that another time. Now it’s off to bed for the Pyles, where they can digest the above-mentioned items - as well as their Smithfield Ham Glace (Hot) with Madeira sauce and spinach, their Peaches Melba and their Blue Point Oysters - and brace themselves for breakfast with Theodore Roosevelt.

In Praise of Cass Gilbert

Cass Gilbert, circa 1907 (via the Minnesota Historical Society)

“Your own life has been a life of success gratifying to all your friends, and the gratification they feel is enhanced a hundred-fold by the consciousness that that success has been well earned by a man who deserves to possess it. For such large hearts and generous spirits as that which you possess not only make the world a brighter and a happier place in which to dwell, but also leave their marks behind them in works of beauty and of grace.”

Howard Pyle to Cass Gilbert, January 2, 1907

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 Titanic Connections

Headpiece for “McAndrew’s Hymn” by Howard Pyle (1894)

Howard Pyle’s connections to the Titanic disaster are tenuous at best, seeing that he had been dead five months when the ship went down. Legend has it, however, that his son Wilfrid, aged 14 - and perhaps also his other son Godfrey, 16 - who had stayed on in Europe to attend school in Switzerland, had tickets for the Titanic’s maiden voyage, but didn’t use them. At least one ticket is believed to have survived, but it’s gone missing. The question is, though, why would the boys leave school in April instead of filling out the school year? Grief? Homesickness? Spring break? At any rate, they wound up sailing safe and sound on the Kaiser Wilhelm II from Cherbourg in July 1912.

But Pyle was indeed connected to at least two bona fide Titanic passengers. One was Major Archibald Butt, who had served as an aide to both Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and who had grown so distressed over the 1912 presidential race that he needed a recuperative trip to Europe. Teddy’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth (whose conversations generated one of my favorite books, Mrs. L) recalled him fondly:

Archie Butt was another good friend. Archibald Willingham Andrew Brackenbreed...Butt, we used to chant, teasing him about his name, which we said sounded like a load of coal falling downstairs. He had a very good sense of humor.

It so happens that Butt mentioned both Alice and Pyle in a letter to his sister, written November 12, 1908, the day after a celebratory White House luncheon attended by key players in Taft’s recent campaign victory over William Jennings Bryan:

A Mr. Pyle, a distinguished illustrator, and his wife were guests also. The former spent most of his time making sketches of those at the table and presenting them to Mrs. Longworth.

(Oh, what I’d give for those sketches! I’ve looked for them, in vain. But, anyway...) It sounds like Butt barely knew Pyle. Actually, unless he was just over-explaining for his sister’s benefit, it sounds like he may not even have known of Pyle. This seems odd, though, considering Pyle’s stature at the time, not to mention his friendship with people Butt knew very well. Like Francis Davis Millet, who apparently shared a house with Butt in Washington, D. C. (and whose relationship with Butt has been the source of some speculation).

Artist-author Frank Millet had known Pyle for over 30 years and was an unabashed enthusiast of Pyle’s work. In fact, Millet had been instrumental in getting Pyle his last mural commission for the Hudson County Court House in Jersey City, New Jersey. On November 14, 1911, Millet, then in Rome, had written to Anne Poole Pyle:

Having been out of touch for some time with newspapers, I came across by accident yesterday the shocking news of your husband’s death. I had planned to come to Florence within a few days to see you all quite unsuspicious that anything was the matter with him.

I write now to offer you my heartfelt sympathies in your great affliction and irreparable loss, this to you and to the children. I shall always cherish as one of my most pleasant memories the visit I made to Wilmington.

He has built a great monument for himself and his family in the art he has produced and has had no rival....

Five months later, Millet joined Archie Butt on the Titanic for the voyage back to America. Both went down with the ship.

Tailpiece for “McAndrew’s Hymn” by Howard Pyle (1894)

[Please note that the images shown here have nothing to do with the Titanic per se, but they’re the best I could do. Pyle made them to illustrate Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “McAndrew’s Hymn” for the December 1894 issue of Scribner’s Magazine.]

Howard Pyle’s Wedding Pictures

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

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

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

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

“A Quaker Wedding” by Howard Pyle (1885)

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

“A Kentucky Wedding” by Howard Pyle (1882)

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

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.

“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...

At the Quill and Grill Club, November 8, 1883

Howard Pyle belonged to many clubs and associations over the years: some well-known - like the Grolier, the Players, and the Century - and a few more obscure. For example, Pyle was a founding member of the Quill and Grill Club, formed on August 17, 1883, in Wilmington, Delaware. It was composed mostly of journalists and lawyers, including some of Pyle’s intimates, such as Alfred Leighton Howe (to whom Pyle dedicated Within the Capes), Lewis C. Vandegrift (dedicatee of The Rose of Paradise and later Pyle’s neighbor), and newspaperman Edward Noble Vallandigham (Pyle’s “esteemed friend of many years standing”).

Interestingly, another early member of the Quill and Grill was the legal scholar and future World Court Judge, John Bassett Moore, then in his early twenties. At an 1885 meeting of the club - held in Pyle’s studio - Moore read poem which was published in his Collected Papers (and once upon a time at the Library of Congress I managed to dig up and hold in my hand the original manuscript). That same year, Moore went to Washington to work under Secretary of State Thomas Francis Bayard (later Pyle’s friend and landlord).

Pyle created the invitation shown here in 1883 or, perhaps, 1884, judging from the style of the lettering and decorations.

At a meeting held on November 8, 1883, attorney Joseph A. Richardson read a poem (dedicated to Miss Elizabeth Shipley Bringhurst, later Mrs. John Galt Smith) entitled “The Evolution and Development of Q. and G.,” in which the club’s founders are humorously described, including this stanza on Howard Pyle:

One by nature has been gifted
With the power of creating
Shapes of most surpassing beauty
From musty tomes of ancient legend.
At his touch sprang into being
Sweet Elaine, Shalott’s fair lady,
Robin Hood, and all his fellows.
His cunning hand that raises
Forms of brave Colonial heroes
Damsels prim in olden costumes,
Cavaliers and burly Roundheads
Till they seem to breathe before us.

Trips off the tongue, no? But we should be grateful to have a relic such as this, which sheds light on how a young Howard Pyle was perceived by his friends.

July 27, 1895

“Your spiritual writings haunt me like personal experiences.”

William Dean Howells to Howard Pyle, July 27, 1895

Howard Pyle and Teddy Roosevelt Do Lunch

Theodore Roosevelt and his four sons by Arthur Hewitt (via NYPL Digital Gallery)

On March 19, 1904, Howard Pyle took the train down from Wilmington, Delaware, to Washington, D.C., for a 1.30 p.m. lunch at the White House. The meal was wedged in between President Theodore Roosevelt’s 11.45 a.m. chat with Admiral Dewey and a 2.30 p.m. meeting with Booker T. Washington. (I often wonder if Pyle met either men on his way in or out - though I should note that there were three other meetings scheduled between Dewey’s and Pyle’s). First thing that same day, Arthur Hewitt took several photographs of Roosevelt and his family, including the one shown above.

The purpose of Pyle’s visit was to talk politics: a Wilmington newspaper had asked him to write what he thought of Theodore Roosevelt's then two-and-a-half-year-old administration. “I have endeavored to do so as honestly and courageously as possible,” he told Roosevelt's secretary, William Loeb, on March 16, “but, now that it is done, I feel, in view of the fact that the President stands in the relation of a personal friend, I should submit the paper to him before publishing it - that is if you think he will care to see it.” Pyle figured that other newspapers might quote him, and he planned to expand the piece (which he also sent) into a magazine article - “Hence a certain added importance to the few words I have written.”

Roosevelt objected to some of Pyle’s unintentionally, yet interpretably critical comments and warned, “Anything that you say will be apt to be taken as the best that a personal friend can say for me, and therefore any condemnation from you will be received and quoted independently of anything that you say that is favorable.” So he asked Pyle to come and talk things over - and, presumably, get “on message.”

Unfortunately, as luck would have it, I haven’t yet found the article Pyle wrote and don’t know if it ever appeared in either the Wilmington newspaper or in the magazine; Pyle mentioned that The Outlook might publish it, but, in looking at 1904 issues, it seems that they didn’t. I'll keep looking.

Below is the page from Roosevelt’s datebook for March 19, 1904 (please pardon the scratchy printout from a microfilm reel at the Library of Congress).

An Invitation from Howard Pyle

How would you like to have gotten this in the mail? It's an invitation - hand-lettered and decorated by Howard Pyle himself - for an event held 106 years ago tonight at 1305 Franklin Street, in Wilmington, Delaware. For those who trip over archaic ligatures and long s's, here is a transcription:

Mr Pyle presents his Compliments and will be happy if you will attend a Bohemian Card Party at his Studio on Saturday, the twelfth day of March, Nineteen Hundred and Four, at Eight o'clock in ye Evening. (Tobacco, Etc.)

A guest list has yet to surface, but one invitee was Henry Francis du Pont, 23, who later founded Winterthur Museum, and was the only son of Pyle's friend Colonel Henry Algernon du Pont. Young Henry brought along another guest, with the host's permission: "Any friend of your father’s son shall always be welcome under my roof," Pyle had assured him.

Pyle's students came, too, after having spent (according to Allen True) "a fine afternoon making things for the evening while [Pyle] painted at his mural decoration and swapped stories." True said they played "a very funny game called Muggins" and that "there was a fine crowd of young people - cards till about eleven when chafing dishes were spread around and we had a Dutch feed and some good singing. It was delightful all the way through and had a distinctive flavor very different from most occasions of the sort."

Mark Twain on Howard Pyle

Today is Mark Twain's 174th birthday - enough of a reason to talk briefly about his (or Samuel L. Clemens's) connection to Howard Pyle.

Of course, the obvious link is that Pyle illustrated Mark Twain's "Saint Joan of Arc" for Harper's Monthly (December 1904). When the magazine initially approached Pyle about the project, they wrote: "It may interest you to know that in [Clemens's] letter accompanying the manuscript he speaks of you as the one man in this or any other country who can make pictures for it." And when Harper's informed Clemens that Pyle had agreed to illustrate the piece, he replied, "I am glad that an artist rich in feeling & imagination is to make the pictures."

But Clemens was already a longtime admirer of Howard Pyle, the artist and the author. Back in early 1884, while staying with the Clemens family, George Washington Cable had noted, "Mrs. Clemens is reading aloud to Mark & the children Howard Pyle's beautiful new version of Robin Hood. Mark enjoys it hugely...." And on New Year's Day in 1903 (shortly after Pyle attended Mark Twain’s 67th birthday party in New York), Clemens reiterated his opinion: "Long ago you made the best Robin Hood that was ever written," and in the same letter he praised Pyle's new version of the King Arthur legends: "They were never so finely told in prose before. And then the pictures - one can never tire of examining them & studying them."

So, by way of a birthday present, here is Pyle's "She believed that she had daily speech with angels" from "Saint Joan of Arc" by Mark Twain. A beautiful thing.