The Press-Gang in New York

Not all of Howard Pyle’s illustrations just “fell off his brush” - I mean, where his concept was vivid enough that he could go straight from hurried thumbnail sketch (or 50, according to legend) to final art. Sometimes he had to do a little more homework. And although there are some relatively careful preliminary studies from his more mature period - like this one from 1902 - he probably made many more of them in his earlier years, when he was less sure of himself. Like this one, which comes from the Brandywine River Museum:

And this one, which was bound into a volume of Pyle’s collected illustrations:

Pyle made both in preparation of his illustration “The Press-Gang in New York” for “Old New York Coffee-Houses” by John Austin Stevens. Here it is as engraved by Smithwick and French, from Harper's New Monthly Magazine for March 1882:

Pyle had completed (and conveniently dated) the work over two years earlier, in December 1879. He was 26, then, living with his parents and siblings at 714 West Street in Wilmington, Delaware, and working in a studio rigged out on the top floor of the family house. He probably worked on this picture there and may have gotten his brothers, Cliff (22) and Walter (20), to pose for him (the second study suggests that he only had one model posing at a time, however).

Fortunately, Pyle’s original black and white gouache also survives in the Mabel Brady Garvan Collection at Yale University, where it’s called “At the Sign of the Griffin.”

That might be their title or one Pyle scribbled on the back, but in December 1880 the painting was exhibited as “The Press Gang” in the Salmagundi Sketch Club Black and White Exhibition at the Academy of Design in New York. The sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, by the way, wrote a letter complimenting Pyle on his work there. “I am happy that you found anything to give you satisfaction in my drawings [sic] in the Salmagundi,” Pyle replied. “I hear there are plenty of them and what they lack in quality may be made up in quantity - like New Jersey Champagne.”

A Child Sunburned in December 1881

As I mentioned in an earlier post, it’s nice, if rare, to put an exact creation date on a work by Howard Pyle. In so many cases, we only know the publication dates, but those can be misleading: a Pyle fable (also already mentioned) written in late 1876 took nine years to appear in print, as did his article “A Peculiar People” written in late 1880 and published in 1889. These are extreme cases, of course, but the crazed stickler for accuracy in me bristles even when I can’t pin down a date to within a few months. Pyle sometimes dated his pictures, but for the most part we have to rely on his patchy correspondence to figure out when he was working on what.

Now here’s piece of good fortune: it’s the actual bill (transcribed below) that Pyle sent along with a completed illustration to Emily Sartain, art editor for Our Continent, a short lived magazine published in Philadelphia. (A fascinating figure in her own right, Emily Sartain was an artist and an engraver, a friend of Mary Cassatt, and had once been romantically linked with Thomas Eakins.)

The $60.00 illustration was “A child sunburned, and with many fluttering shreds of raiment” for Helen Campbell’s “Under Green Apple Boughs” and it appeared in the very first issue of Our Continent for February 15, 1882. The 5.2 x 5.8" wood engraving was by Frederick Juengling. The original art has not yet materialized, but two of its companions have, so no doubt it was a black and white gouache, measuring somewhere in the range of 12.5 x 13.5" to 13.5 x 14.75".

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I have not heard from the engraver French as yet [Note: Frank French engraved the second, fourth, and sixth illustrations in this series]

Wilmington Del

Dec 9th 1881

Miss Sartain

I send first illus. for Under Green Apple Boughs

I hope and think it will prove satisfactory. I have put the best work I could upon it. Of course you will understand it is coarsely done for reduction to proper size. I hope you will find it follows the text.

Will go right on with the other drawings. Inclosed please find bill

In Haste Yours &c

Howard Pyle

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Dr

Our Continent Publishing Co

to Howard Pyle Cr

For one illustration for story Under Green Apple Boughs - sixty dollars

$60 00/100.

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A Bit of Politics in the Olden Times, 1880

Howard Pyle’s “Politics in the Olden Times - General Jackson, President-elect, on His Way to Washington” (13.3 x 9.1") was engraved on wood by Smithwick & French and accompanied a short text titled “A Presidential Progress” in Harper’s Weekly for March 12, 1881. Pyle painted it in 1880 (apparently in April) and the scene takes place somewhere along the Old National Pike, which he had traversed from Frederick, Maryland, to West Virginia in 1879 with William Henry Rideing, an English-born journalist, in preparation for a long, illustrated article for Harper's Monthly. Now let me catch my breath...

Here is a small portion of the original painting (17 x 11.5") which will be sold tomorrow. The lot listing says it is “grisaille on paperboard” and I assume Pyle used gouache as it was his medium of choice at the time for what he exasperatingly called his “wash drawings.” I detect a distinct proto-Norman Rockwellian quality to this detail and to the picture as a whole, but it is typical of Pyle’s work for Harper's Weekly from the early 1880s.