A Glimpse Inside the Howard Pyle Studios

This link probably won’t be viable for ever, but it gives us a look inside the Howard Pyle Studios in Wilmington - particularly of the seldom seen upper floor. As the article says, the studios’ owner is having its first major outdoor fundraiser – 100 Artists Helping Artists – September 14-15 in Greenville, Delaware - to help with costs of upkeep and preservation of the buildings.

Happy 160th Birthday, Howard Pyle!

“It looks very much posed”

The above photograph, showing Howard Pyle with “The Evacuation of Charlestown” on his easel in his Wilmington studio, has now and then been dated 1897 and 1898.

But 1897 is incorrect because Pyle only started the painting in mid-1898: Frank Schoonover remembered that Pyle (his teacher at the time) was working on it during the Drexel Institute’s first Summer School of Illustration - which officially opened on June 23, 1898:

I recall that Mr. Pyle set up a very poor three-legged easel on the lawn in front of the house at Chadds Ford, and put his canvas on the easel. Miss Ellen Bernard Thompson...was painting something on the lower side of the road, and just beyond her was the Indian painter, Angel DeCora. There were some chairs and books of engravings of Colonial ships of the line out on the porch, and there were also the Pyle children playing around in the yard. The sky was very blue that day, with many floating clouds. Mr. Pyle asked me to fasten the canvas so that it would not shake, so I went back into the house and got the things needed.

Mr. Pyle then sat down on a kitchen chair and started to work under an apple tree, but he had no mahl stick. Then he said, “Frank, I see a fine straight sucker up there - climb up and cut it off.” I did so...

It was amazing to see him do this painting with so many distractions such as the children’s running around and so forth.... The painting has a shadow across the water like the shadow of the lawn, and the sky is as it was that day at Chadds Ford with the drifting clouds making shadows on the uneven lawn, which was much the color of the water in the picture. This was a lesson to all the students to interpret the things around them when painting.

“The Evacuation of Charlestown” was later packed up and hurried off to be photographed and made into a half-tone plate, just in time to appear in Scribner’s Magazine for September 1898. The Delaware Art Museum now owns the original painting (oil on canvas 23.25 x 35.25" - if you’re keeping score).



But back to the above photo: 1898 is probably the wrong date, too. Years ago, looking in a box at the Delaware Art Museum’s library, I saw - I think - two glass-plate negatives made by Cyrus Peter Miller Rumford. There, too, I saw Rumford’s scribbled notes stating that these were “Portraits of Howard Pyle for Home Journal ’99” and (provided I’m reading my own scribbles correctly) it seems that Rumford arrived with his camera at Pyle’s Wilmington studio at 3.00 p.m. one January day in 1899 and took a total of four photos.

Rumford, who had turned 26 that month, was a recent Harvard graduate (Class of 1897) and already a prize-winning photographer. And, apparently, either from his own or Pyle’s initiative he made the photos for an article in the April 1899 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal, titled “The Journal’s Artists in Their Studios” - but for some reason the magazine chose not to print them.

Pyle’s own opinion of the photos sounds mixed: on February 11, 1899, he dictated the following letter:

Wilmington, Del.

My dear Mr Rumford:

I am very much obliged to you for the photograph of myself in my studio. It looks very much posed, but that is the fault of the subject and not of the photographer. It was very kind of you to remember me.

Once more thanking you,

I am

Very truly yours

Howard Pyle

February eleventh.

I don’t know why Pyle says “the photograph” and not “the photographs” - maybe Rumford only sent a print of what he considered the best. But “very much posed” is about right: these two known photos show a seated Pyle - who usually stood at his easel - stiffly “at work” on the already-finished “Evacuation of Charlestown”.

I should note, too, that Pyle’s letter to Rumford was handwritten by Pyle’s secretary, Anna W. Hoopes, and although it appears to be signed by Pyle, the signature is, in fact, the work of Miss Hoopes as well. In a 1935 talk she explained:

When rushed at the end of the day with correspondence, [Mr. Pyle] often asked me to sign his letters; and I became so proficient at imitating his signature, that he once made me promise not to copy his handwriting, jokingly remarking that sometime I might want to sign his checks.

Howard Pyle’s Drawing Desk

While sitting, tethered to my drawing table pretty constantly for three months, I often wondered what it would be like to stand and draw. That’s what Howard Pyle did, sometimes. Legend has it that he even had a drawing desk custom-made at just the right height so that he could comfortably draw - or write - standing up.

I had pictured it being like an old fashioned, four-legged schoolmaster’s desk, until I finally laid eyes on it (for the first time, I think) this past fall at the Delaware Art Museum. It’s really more of a lectern (or rostrum, or shtender) and it’s not “Early American” at all. And now I wonder if Pyle had it specially made or if he merely had an existing piece - like this one - modified. One of Pyle’s mahlsticks sits on the little top shelf.

Hot Air at Howard Pyle’s Studio

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

Another Look In and Around the Pyle Studios

Still more video showing the insides and outsides of Howard Pyle’s studio buildings at 1305 Franklin Street in Wilmington, Delaware.

A Video Tour of Howard Pyle’s Studio

I just noticed this video on Howard Pyle. Not all of it is accurate, but there are lots of images and much footage taken in and around his Wilmington studio. Makes for a good vicarious visit.

An Evening with Howard Pyle in 1910

Howard Pyle photographed by J. R. Cummings in 1910

On his blog, James Gurney posted a reading he did from Henry Pitz’s The Brandywine Tradition. Take a listen.

In constructing that chapter, Pitz drew on the written and spoken reminiscences of several Pyle students. One of his main sources was an article published in the November 1919 issue of Delaware Magazine, which remains, perhaps, the most extensive description of a Pyle “Composition Lecture”.

The author was an unsung and virtually unknown Pyle student named Elizabeth Keeler Gurney (any relation, James?). According to the 1900 Census, her parents were from Maine, but she was born in India in March 1881. She was a school teacher in Saint Cloud, Minnesota in 1900, and a little later began her studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. There, she may well have heard Pyle lecture in 1903 and 1905, and her schoolmates over the years included future Pyle students George DuBuis, Harvey Dunn, Edwin Roscoe Shrader, Helen Leonard, and Frances Rogers.

I don’t know when Miss Gurney came east to Wilmington, but The Duluth News Tribune of September 2, 1907, had this to say:

ST. CLOUD YOUNG WOMAN SCORES SUCCESS IN EAST
----
Miss Bessie Guerney [sic], Artist Pupil of Howard Pyle, Now on Staff of Big Daily

Miss Bessie Guerney...a young artist of marked ability, is making an enviable record for herself under the instruction of Howard Pyle, one of the foremost artists in America. Though Mr. Pyle very seldom takes young women as students, friends of Miss Guerney succeeded in making her an exception with the artist, and after seeing some of her work she was instructed to “come on.”

It continued:

That she has made good is best evidenced by the fact that for several months past she has been a member of the staff of one of Delaware’s leading newspapers, dividing her time between studio and the newspaper.

I don’t know which newspaper she worked for, but I have an unsubstantiated hunch that she authored some Pyle-related articles that appeared in Wilmington’s Every Evening in 1910 and 1911.

Since Gurney must have attended a good number of Pyle’s lectures, her 1919 reminiscence could very well be an embellished, composite portrait. But she alludes to “an article in a current magazine” - and that turns out to have been “An Artist Without a Pose” in the Ladies’ Home Journal for March 1910. So I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and say this particular lecture occurred in mid-February 1910, just after that issue of the Journal appeared.

Later in 1910, just after Pyle sailed for Italy, Gurney gave a talk about him, his class, and his philosophy. When asked why he left, she said that he had “gone stale”. But her article shows Pyle at the height of his powers - and, perhaps, as he would have liked to be remembered.

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

AN EVENING WITH HOWARD PYLE
by Elizabeth Gurney

“Did you ever hear, and feel, and smell, as well as see a picture?”

This question was asked of his pupils by Howard Pyle, the famous Delaware artist, one winter night years ago. The class, together with invited guests had assembled in Mr. Pyle’s studio, on Franklin Street, in Wilmington, for the weekly evening lecture. Its members occupied a motley, yet beautiful, collection of colonial and mediaeval chairs - big chairs, little chairs, fat chairs, thin chairs - chairs as diversified as the Pied Piper’s rats. The chairs were drawn up in prayer-meeting fashion so as to face a long row of charcoal drawings, suspended like a family washing from a clothes-line. Flanking the line, painted canvases rested against convenient chair legs. Firelight played upon the polished hardwood of floor and walls, picked out shiny lights in queer jugs and bottles upon shelves; and illumined the eager, interested faces of the group of young women and men, mostly young men.

Carven ships’ figures, Venetian treasure chests, a piratical array of antique pistols and knives, bits of drapery, and easels, surrounded the group. Above them hung curious lanterns and many ropes ending in wooden balls. The ropes, when pulled, shifted skylight curtains; but how Mr. Pyle could ever tell what rope worked which curtain was a never-ending marvel to his pupils.

In the semi-darkness of an adjoining room some of the artist’s paintings could be dimly seen against the walls. Through gabled windows shone frosty, blue moonlight, accentuating the golden warmth within, and blackly silhouetting a few ivy leaves which had strayed across the windows from the mass thickly curtaining the outside brick walls.


Between pupils and drawings stood the tall figure of Mr. Pyle, massive of head. A pupil once remarked that with the addition of a powdered wig, Howard Pyle could have posed for a portrait of George Washington. The two men were not unlike in character. Great souled and kindly hearted, they possessed a personal dignity, even austerity, which did not unbend except in the presence of intimates. The artist’s pupils were greatly amused by an article in a current magazine describing the children of Wilmington as running up to Mr. Pyle, on the street to see what he had in his pockets! This Puritan dignity was marked in the artist’s paintings. His Spanish dancers were not sensuous; his oriental maidens were never voluptuous.

Mr. Pyle, his students, and his guests were surveying a sketch of salt marshes when he repeated his question.

“Do you consciously use all your senses to feel the reality, when composing or looking at a picture?” He made the class feel the dampness of the marshes upon their cheeks and the warmth of the sunshine; he made them hear the rustle of the breeze among the reeds, the songs of unseen birds, the lowing of invisible cattle; he made them fill their nostrils with the salt fragrance of the marshland; its brine was upon their lips. When he had finished, the class were not looking at a drawing, but were exploring vast stretches of moor with illimitable sky overhead.

“That is the value of pictures to make us feel life and truth!” he exclaimed. “Respect the truth,” was his most frequent admonition. He taught that an artist must have reality, not a picture, in his mind, when he put brush to canvas. He must mentally see real mountains in all their bigness if he would paint a picture that would make the beholder feel the grandeur of mountains. When the artist’s mind began to see a small painting of mountains instead of real mountains, when he began to think about his paints, or his technic, or himself, at that moment his work became artificial and without value, in the opinion of Howard Pyle.


“When I was painting this picture of a battle,” he told the class, referring to a Civil War scene now in the State Capitol of Minnesota, “I felt the reality so vividly that I had occasionally to go to the door of the studio and breathe fresh air to clear my lungs of the powder and smoke.”

Mr. Pyle passed down the line of compositions, commenting vigorously.

“These are not real trees - they are only paint. A bird could not fly through the foliage without getting tangled up in the paint. The moon could not possibly be as large when so high above the horizon, and it would not be that color at the time of year indicated by the painting. Here is a man in a blizzard. Why is there no snow on his shoulders? Why is he not huddled-up as a man would be in the cold? Here is a laborer, digging in a trench. His muscles are not straining under the effort. Although he has worked at this job for some time, his clothes are as clean and unwrinkled as if they just were new from the shop. In this colonial picture, you do not feel that these people’s clothes are their usual attire. They wear them as stiffly and the clothes are as little wrinkled as if these were people at a fancy dress ball.”

The speaker paused and surveyed his audience reproachfully.

“You all know better. Why do you put falsities into your pictures when you recognize them as such the moment I point them out? Simply because you don’t think. Anybody can learn to draw. It is ease to draw, but it is very difficult to think. You haven’t material with which to think because you are all blind. Most people are blind. They don’t really see what is around them. Mention some building they have seen a hundred times. They cannot give an accurate description of it from memory. Store your mind richly by cultivating your observation.”


Mr. Pyle pointed an eloquent finger at his pupils. “A blade of grass. When I said that, did you see anything more in your mind than a green spear of grass?”

That was exactly what the class had seen. They shifted about guiltily in the mediaeval chairs, which promptly retaliated by prodding them in the ribs with unexpected knobs and corners. Mediaeval chairs were never intended to be sat upon. Probably more than one war of the Middle Ages was due to the soreness of body and temper of some king who had been oblige to spend the morning upon a mediaeval throne while his more fortunate courtiers could stand. However, being artists, Mr. Pyle’s pupils loved to sit in the mediaeval chairs because of their beauty.

“You ought,” continued the master, “to see that grass-blade pearled with dewdrops, waving gently in the wind, and a little red lady-bug struggling up its length.”


Perhaps because most of the drawings were in black and white, Mr. Pyle’s attention was now attracted to a Biblical subject in full color. It depicted the angel descending to touch the pool, whereupon the first infirm person to be lowered into its waters would be healed.

“There is much of value in this composition,” remarked the lecturer, with an approving smile to the happy young woman who had painted it. “But I seem to feel too much darkness and discouragement about it. I feel that all these poor, sick people would be bathed in the glory of light and hope shed upon them by the great angel of their redemption.”

“Gosh!” forcibly, if not elegantly, exclaimed the young woman artist to a friend after the lecture, “I painted that composition for a class in my art school in Chicago. The teacher there said that the light and shade were not well balanced. He recommended more white paint for the upper right-hand portion. His criticism left me cold. I brought the picture tonight to see how his criticism would compare with Mr. Pyle’s. The two criticisms mean much the same thing as far as the paint is concerned, but Mr. Pyle’s criticism is the one that inspires me. I want to go right home and finish that picture tonight!”

Now came the event for which the class had been hoping and praying all evening. Mr. Pyle seized a piece of charcoal and began remodelling one of the compositions. He did not often do this. He said it was too hard to lose himself in a picture when hampered by the consciousness of other people around. Like a miracle the composition took on life, while the class held its breath and realized its rare good fortune in seeing creative genius at work. Not a pupil moved hand or foot lest the spell be broken and the artist drop his charcoal. Mentally, each member planned to hold up the owner of the composition on the way home, and steal it from him. However, Mr. Pyle smudged out his work after he had ceased drawing. This always happened, but the class invariably hoped that for once he might forget to do so. The master explained that if he left it, the pupil might copy him instead of developing his own expression. Mr. Pyle was ever anxious to preserve the originality of his students, warning them against becoming imitators of himself, or anybody else.

The last composition to be criticized was the work of a pupil already famous in the art world. Mr. Pyle usually criticized such pupils with much detail, but with a respect which showed the high esteem in which he held their work. The present sketch was an illustration to a detective story, a murder scene.

“In the first place, it is a mistake to show gruesome and horrible things plainly in a picture,” was the comment. “The mind is so repelled that it instinctively refuses further attention and thus defeats the purpose of the drawing. Then, suggestion is always more powerful than a direct telling. Here we have the dead man, the knife, and the murderer, unmistakably shown. There is no mystery, nothing to puzzle and intrigue the imagination, and we turn away. How much more powerful would be a mass of men crowding around a slightly-seen object. Then there is mystery. We want to know what happened and who did it.

“Pictures should suggest so many possibilities as to set the mind to thinking, and thus hold the attention. We have all seen wonderfully painted groups in art exhibits - perhaps a vase and a bit of drapery, marvelously executed. The artist may have spent weeks upon the painting, yet it has little interest. We turn away, saying, ‘Very clever, but in heaven’s name why did he paint it?’”

Howard Pyle’s chief abhorrences were artificiality and sentimentality - not sentiment - in pictures. He disliked the aged man gazing at the ghost of his girl-wife in the opposite chair. He loathed doll-like girl heads decorated with exaggerated flowers. He even once complained of a painted dancing-bear because it lacked individuality. It was well drawn, but it was just any bear in general, not a particular bear with well-defined likes and dislikes.

Art was for everybody, in Mr. Pyle’s opinion. He had no patience with art teachers who used grandiloquent, technical terms. He believed art was life and truth, and as such to be appreciated by everybody, and to be talked of in the simplest every-day language. With the line of drawings disposed of, he generally concluded his lecture with a little good advice.

“Young people, don’t get the idea that you have an artistic temperament which must be humored. Don’t believe you cannot do good work unless you feel in the mood for it. That is all nonsense. I frequently have to force myself to make a start in the morning; but after a short while I find I can work. Only hard and regular work will bring success.”

“I wonder if we know how lucky we are to have these lectures?” queried one pupil of another, as they went forth into the starlight, the snow crisply crunching under their feet.

“Probably we shall never realize what treasures of heart and soul, Howard Pyle has freely poured out upon us until we can no longer have the lectures. Then we shall look back and say that these were the happiest days of our lives,” answered his friend, quietly.

Still in Howard Pyle’s Studio

Olive Rush and Ethel Pennewill Brown in Howard Pyle’s Studio in 1911 or 1912 (Blanche C. Grant, photographer)

I was looking for this picture in connection with my last post, but couldn’t find it at first since it’s not in the Olive Rush Papers, but in the Miscellaneous Photograph Collection at the Archives of American Art. It’s described there as “Olive Rush (at left) c. 1908” by an unidentified photographer. But the woman on the right is definitely Ethel Pennewill Brown and the photographer is Blanche C. Grant - her head and shoulder are reflected in the mirror as she stoops over the unseen camera. Grant took the picture when she was sharing Howard Pyle’s Wilmington studio with Brown and Rush in 1911 and possibly part of 1912.

The setting is the small anteroom through which one would pass after coming in the front door and before entering the studio proper. On the right is a “Rare Old Tyrolean Cabinet, carved Italian walnut, fitted with pewter basin and fount” that was Lot 161 in the auction of Pyle’s estate in June 1912. (It went for for $185.) And in the mirror is Pyle’s original pen and ink drawing, “Sir Kay showeth the mystic Sword unto Sir Ector,” from The Story of King Arthur.

“Sir Kay showeth the mystic Sword unto Sir Ector” by Howard Pyle (1902)

In Howard Pyle’s Studio, 1911

Ethel Pennewill Brown in Howard Pyle’s studio, 1911

Olive Rush, Blanche Grant, and Ethel Pennewill Brown in Howard Pyle’s studio, 1911

Before leaving for Italy in November 1910, Howard Pyle asked his student Ethel Pennewill Brown if she and her friend and fellow-student, Olive Rush (then in Paris), would rent his studio while he was gone. It would cost $50 a month - too much money, in Rush’s view - but Brown accepted Pyle’s offer. Rush was “amazed” by Brown’s action, but was able to rationalize it: “I suppose she could hardly refuse - when he insisted that we take it whether we pay all up or not - after all his former kindnesses it might have seemed ungrateful.”

Indeed, rent was not non-negotiable: some months later, even, Pyle reassured Brown, “I want you to pay me whatever you feel that you can afford upon it. I want at any rate for you to have the studio, and I would rather that you should have it for nothing at all than that it should go into other and stranger hands.”

Rush, however, had to back out of the plan (temporarily, at least, since she needed to hurry from Europe to Indiana and care for her dying mother) and another artist, Blanche Chloe Grant (1874-1948), stepped in. Grant was a stranger to Pyle, but not to Brown, who had met her the previous winter at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Fortunately, one hundred years ago today - March 11, 1911 - the newspaper Every Evening described what Pyle called the “girls’ settlement” at 1305 Franklin Street:

...Even though the master is away, art goes on in Wilmington just the same. The atmosphere remains and there is yet Mr. Pyle’s studio with some of his immortal pen and inks hanging on the wall above the Franklin stove, a few oils on the walls, and there are his “properties,” generously left for the common good. He always did lend generously of himself and his substance, and now that he is removed to a distant land, there is still recourse to his possessions, albeit the studio is now given over to the woman in art. Mr. Pyle never has favored the woman for painting, but he always recognised ability, and far from putting obstacles in the way, made the path of true merit and devotion to work as easy as his advice would make it....

Who couldn’t work in the very “Holy of Holies,” the “Sanctum Sanctorum?” The very air bespeaks the presence of Mr. Pyle and emits the elixir that feeds ambition and spurs one on to deeds of art. Miss Grant came to this city about two weeks after Mr. Pyle went abroad, but she feels the influence and has not regretted the choice of her workshop. It had been arranged that Miss Olive Rush would be with Miss Brown, but on her return from Europe, early in December, it was necessary for Miss Rush to go to her home in Indiana; hence Miss Grant’s opportunity.

There is always a wholesome respect and a little awe for Mr. Pyle’s possessions, and everybody takes the best care of his furniture and his effects in general. The studio is “homey” and “comfy” and many drop in, artistic and otherwise. On Saturday nights the gathering devotes its time to sketching, and all the women artists come to draw friends who love to pose for them. On Wednesday nights it’s musical, and the laity join with knights and ladies of the brush. The piano and the violin sound through the lights and shadows of the studio and all is merry within. There is light for the players and gloom for the audience if they seek the south room or the recesses of the high-backed settle before the chimney place. Mr. Pyle’s writing room, up the little stairway, is a fine place for playing that you’re Barbara Frietchie or to wave your handkerchief to Romeo....

And perhaps even more fortunately, somebody took photographs of the studio while Brown, Rush, and Grant were staying there. The ones shown here come from the Olive Rush Papers at the Archives of American Art and more can be seen in Box 6, Folders 7 and 8, conveniently digitized (but not very well labeled) here.

John G. Weller and Ethel Pennewill Brown posing in Howard Pyle’s studio, 1911

September 21, 1910

Howard Pyle, 1910

I have it on good authority that this well-known snapshot of Howard Pyle was taken 100 years ago today. The photographer? Paul Strayer (1885–1981), a young Chicago artist, who had made a “pilgrimage” to Pyle’s Wilmington studio. Other photographs from this day show that Pyle, Stanley Arthurs, and Frank Schoonover were still hard at work on the enormous “Life in and Old Dutch Town” mural for the Hudson County Court House - which had just officially opened.

In a 1947 letter to Gertrude Brincklé, Strayer recalled his visit: how he had brought along a bound collection of Pyle’s illustrations; how Pyle sat down at a round Colonial table and slowly went through the volume, commenting on the pictures; and how, when he got to the end, Pyle asked, “Would you like me to draw a little picture in it for you?” and on the fly-leaf drew the head of a 17th Century cavalier (a common Pylean “doodle”) and signed it, “Howard Pyle, September 21, 1910.”

In 1953, Strayer - perhaps commemorating the centennial of Pyle’s birth - painted the portrait below, based on the snapshots he had (allegedly!) taken 43 years earlier.

Howard Pyle in 1910, by Paul Strayer