“It is a big serious business”

“The class organization that Mr. Pyle suggested at his dinner has been going forward and I am now serving as one of five on a committee for framing a constitution and perfecting some scheme for the school organization.”

So wrote Pyle student Allen Tupper True to his mother on March 29, 1903. “His dinner” was Howard Pyle’s 50th birthday party, held at his Wilmington studio on March 5, 1903. There (as True had told his mother in a previous letter), in addition to the feast and festivities, Pyle had “made a good speech in which he told us of the organization he wanted among us and what hopes he had for the American Art that we were to build.”

“The committee on constitution has its work very nearly done now and we are all a bit proud of what we have done,” True wrote on April 12, 1903. “It is a hard business to get a hold of I find….” And a week later he said, “The work on the Constitution Comm. is about finished and our report will go before the crowd soon…”

The crowd, in this case, were the 18 official or “active members” of “The Howard Pyle School of Art”:

Stanley M. Arthurs
Clifford W. Ashley
William J. Aylward
Arthur E. Becher
Ernest J. Cross
Philip R. Goodwin
George M. Harding
Philip L. Hoyt
James E. McBurney
Gordon M. McCouch
Francis Newton
Thornton Oakley
Samuel M. Palmer
Henry J. Peck
Frank E. Schoonover
Harry E. Townsend
Allen T. True
N. C. Wyeth

(Absent from this list were several other Pyle students who had attended the birthday dinner, but who were not considered members of the school, per se, including Herman Pfeifer, Hermann C. Wall, Frank Bird Masters, and Ethel Franklin Betts. Also absent were Sarah S. Stilwell, Dorothy Warren, and Walter Whitehead, who had studied with Pyle after he resigned from the Drexel Institute. And it should be noted that although Pyle was always willing to critique the work of women artists who sought his advice, “The Howard Pyle School of Art” was strictly men only.)

Eventually, the constitution and by-laws - as well as the text of the song sung at Pyle’s party - were handed over to Wilmington’s John M. Rogers, who was Pyle’s go-to printer for almost a decade. It’s not yet known how many copies were printed, but the copy seen here belonged to Henry J. Peck.

In his March 29, 1903 letter, True had said of the constitution: “It is a big serious business and unless I am mistaken, this organization - whose seeds only we are planting now - will be heard from in coming years and its influence will be decidedly felt in American Art of the future.”

But, as with many of Pyle’s big plans, “The Howard Pyle School of Art” - as a formal organization, at least - lasted only a few years before it fell by the wayside. Yet the Pyle “School” - in the broadest sense of the word - was indeed heard from and its influence was decidedly felt for decades to come.

Pyle on Barye and Wyeth

In a post two years ago, I quoted Howard Pyle’s thoughts on the sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, but I want to expand on that post to show why he brought Barye up in the first place.

On August 29, 1904, 21-year-old N. C. Wyeth brought in the charcoal drawing seen here for Pyle’s weekly composition lecture.

According to Ethel Pennewill Brown and Olive Rush - who took notes during these lectures - Pyle said something like this that day:

Now, Mr. Wyeth this lacks just a little of being a great composition. In the main it is well told, but you have been a little overdramatic with your figures.

A panther crouching to spring on his victim is not possessed of passion but merely a desire to eat. He is cool, calculating, hungry.

Barye is one of the very few who have rightly expressed the animal nature.

I recall a thing by him of greyhounds killing hares. One of the hounds had a hare in its strong jaws and was crunching it in a cold-blooded way - absolutely without any feeling or passion.

A wild beast devouring another take its food in a way natural to it, as a tree absorbs moisture, rather than as a creature bent on revenge.

When you throw your own self into the animal you make him human. You should consider him a being different from yourself.

The action of the Indian, too, is overstated.

He knows escape is impossible and his only hope lies in meeting the attack. So he would not lean back [sic] as you have him but would instinctively brace himself for the blow.

It’s possible that Wyeth subsequently altered this composition, but I’m inclined to think that it looks now as it did 110 years ago - despite the fact that the Indian is leaning forward, not back.

“Greyhound and Hare” by Antoine-Louis Barye

The picture of Wyeth’s drawing comes via the Brandywine River Museum. The original belongs to the Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art (Paulus Leeser, photographer; Courtesy of Nicholas Wyeth, Inc.)

A Valley Forge Picnic, 1899

There are few more iconic photographs of Howard Pyle and his pupils, perhaps, than the one shown here. Its appeal has a lot to do with Miss Bertha Corson Day’s over-the-shoulder gaze, inviting countless viewers into the scene, ever since the photo was taken 115 years ago.

In fact, by my reckoning, the photo was taken 115 years ago today, on August 20, 1899, in or en route to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

At the time, Pyle was conducting the second Summer School of Illustration under the auspices of the Drexel Institute. Their home base was Chadds Ford, but frequently they would mount their “wheels” (including a recently acquired tandem bicycle or two) or climb aboard a carriage and set off to explore the surrounding countryside, to observe the effects of color and light on the trees and streams and hills, to sketch - and to eat.

In a letter of Sunday, August 6, 1899, Pyle’s student Frank Schoonover wrote:

Next Sunday we all go to Valley Forge, some on wheels others in a 4 seated carriage - two tandems, Mr. Pyle steering one, I the other, he considers so he says, me the most skilled and strongest rider among the boys - except [Philip L.] Hoyt - who is a hard rider. Mr. Pyle’s ideas sometimes are a bit off color, and while I’m very far from being the best rider, still he thinks so - let him think.

“Next Sunday” indicates August 13, but the plans changed - The Philadelphia Record’s forecast that day was for “weather unsettled” - and Miss Day noted in her diary that the trip actually occurred on Sunday, August 20, 1899. It also happened to be the day she turned 24, but for some reason she “told no one here that it was my birthday.” Instead, she secretly celebrated it by “riding the tandem with Mr. Pyle in relays from here to the Forge and back. 50 miles. Home by moonlight” [the moon was full or nearly so on August 20, by the way] and they “did not reach home till after midnight.”

This photograph has been reprinted several times over the years, but some of the sitters have been misidentified. Here is my take, from left to right:

Philip L. Hoyt (with glasses)
Frank Schoonover (with cap)
Anna Whelan Betts (with turned-away face)
Howard Pyle (with cap and white turtleneck)
Robert Lindsay Mason (with dark hat)
Bertha Corson Day (looking at us)
Sarah S. Stilwell (with braided pony tail)
Annie Hailey (holding glass)
Emlen McConnell (with necktie)
Ellen Bernard Thompson (in profile)
faceless woman: probably Pyle’s secretary Anna W. Hoopes

Missing from the group are Stanley Arthurs and Clyde DeLand - one of whom was probably the photographer.

In researching this post, I noticed that the Bertha Corson Day Bates’ papers at Delaware Art Museum contain a print of the above photo, titled “Howard Pyle and students, picnicking par terre” and also one called “Pyle and students at picnic table, Valley Forge” - a cyanotype version of the photo below, which I spoke about here.

Having assumed the photo was taken somewhere in Chadds Ford, I didn’t trust the title, but now I see that it was indeed taken at Valley Forge and - I’ll wager - later in the day on August 20, 1899. The setting is the rear or east side of the Isaac Potts House, better known as Washington’s Headquarters.

Here is a photo of that side of the house (via fineartamerica.com), taken around the same time, but in winter and from the opposite point of view. But note the leaning tree, the stonework and shutters, and the white path:

Here, too, is another shot taken on the west side of the house, but showing the clapboard building seen in the Pyle class photo. That building can also be seen on page 88 of this document.

But why do I think the two photos of Pyle’s class were taken the same day? Because - as indicated in the papers of Schoonover and Day - it was the only journey to Valley Forge taken by the entire class in the summer of 1899. Plus, although folks didn’t change their clothes all that frequently in those days, there are many similarities in the outfits seen in both shots.

By the way, among other work being done by Pyle’s students at this time, Frank Schoonover was making his very first book illustrations for A Jersey Boy in the Revolution by Everett T. Tomlinson, published later that year by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. In fact, that same week, Schoonover - who had turned 22 the day before the Valley Forge trip - was painting the picture seen here, “A ball had crashed through the side.” It was the second of the set of four and his letters indicate that Pyle himself added a few brushstrokes - or more - to it.

Of course, Valley Forge was not unfamiliar territory for Howard Pyle: his earliest known visit was in 1879, when he was illustrating “Some Pennsylvania Nooks” by Ella Rodman Church for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (April 1880), and perhaps he went again in 1896 for his picture of George Washington and General Steuben, or when painting “My dear,” said General Washington, “Captain Prescott’s behavior was inexcusable” for “Love at Valley Forge” (The Ladies’ Home Journal, December 1896); and he had also visited earlier that summer of 1899 (on July 9, with Arthurs, Hoyt, and McConnell - perhaps on a test run). Some ten years later, he returned again with his wife, son Godfrey, and a few friends and left “his mark” in the Washington Memorial Chapel guestbook.

And not long after Pyle’s death, a few of his historical artifacts wound up there, too: according to the 1912 Historical and Topographical Guide to Valley Forge by William Herbert Burk, “The most recent acquisitions are from the Howard Pyle collection - original uniforms and costumes used by the artist in his studies of Colonial life.”

Frank E. Schoonover - A Long Life in Art

Yes, yet another Pyle-related video to watch. Here, the story of Frank E. Schoonover (1877-1972), one of Howard Pyle’s longest-lived and most devoted students, is told by his three grandchildren, who were interviewed in the Wilmington studio their grandfather used from 1906 on (after Pyle had pushed several “graduates” from his own nest of studios a few blocks away). Home movies and audio recordings of an elderly Schoonover are a nice addition to this documentary - it’s always great to see these folks move around and speak. So take a look. And while you’re there, also poke around the Frank E. Schoonover Fund and the Schoonover Studios sites.

Raising the First National Flag, January 1, 1776

“Raising the First American Flag, January 1, 1776” by C. O. DeLand

No, this isn’t a long-lost Howard Pyle: it’s by Clyde Osmer DeLand, who painted it under Pyle’s supervision at the Drexel Institute in the fall of 1897. As Pyle explained in a January 1898 description of his School of Illustration:

...I hold a “Composition Class” every week, some of the compositions submitted being of an excellence sufficient to admit their being used in pictorial form - page and double-page cuts - by the more important illustrated periodicals....

To cultivate independence, the compositions made by the pupils are from time to time submitted to some leading illustrated periodical or newspaper, and if accepted are worked up into a picture with only verbal criticism upon my part.

Such was the case with one of DeLand’s drawings which, after meeting with Pyle’s approval, was submitted to and approved by Harper’s Weekly. DeLand then got an official order for the picture and started painting.

Although it’s not a very well-known aspect of his mentoring, Pyle encouraged his students to write as well as illustrate, just as he had done with great success. Some, but not many, followed his advice, including DeLand who supplied his own text for “Raising the First American Flag, January 1, 1776” in the January 1, 1898, issue of Harper’s Weekly. In fact, it’s possible that DeLand (who turned 25 when the magazine was on the newsstands) was the first Pyle student to have his own illustrated text published. Here’s what he wrote:

THE FIRST NATIONAL FLAG
by Clyde O. Deland

Prospect Hill (known also as Mount Pisgah) was the strongest fortification of the American army during the siege of Boston, and it was here that the Union flag was unfurled for the first time January 1, 1776, the day on which the new Continental army was organized.

Upon that day copies of the King’s speech at the opening of Parliament had been sent from Boston by General Howe to Washington. The speech was one better fitted to arouse opposition than submission to the English throne. It stated that the British nation was too spirited and powerful to give up those colonies which had been protected for so many years with “much expense of blood and treasure”; that both its army and navy had been strengthened, and that negotiations for foreign aid were already entered into. The English authorities entertained great hopes of the salutary effects of this message from the throne to the rebellious Americans. Accordingly the hoisting of the Union flag and the discharge of thirteen guns that saluted it were hailed with great delight by the British officers, who supposed it to be a token of submission to the crown.

Referring to these circumstances, Washington, in a letter to Joseph Reed, dated January 4, 1776, said: “The speech I send you. A volume of them were sent out by the Boston gentry, and, farcical enough, we gave great joy to them without knowing or intending it. For on that day - the day which gave being to our new army, but before the proclamation came to hand - we had hoisted the Union flag, in compliment to the united colonies. But, behold! it was received in Boston as a token of the deep impression the speech made upon us, and as a signal of submission. So we hear by a person out of Boston last night. By this time, I presume, they begin to think it strange that we have not made a formal surrender of our lines.”

The Annual Register of 1776 gives a more detailed description of the flag. It says, “So great was the rage and indignation [of the Americans] that they burned the speech and changed their colors from a plain red ground, which they had hitherto used, to a flag with thirteen stripes, as a symbol of the number and the union of the colonies.”

Previous to this, so-called “Union flags” were sometimes displayed, but were merely British standards with the legend “Liberty and Property,” or “Liberty and Union,” set upon the field as emblems of colonial rights and principles.

In 1855 the historian Benson J. Lossing discovered a contemporary colored drawing that for the first time rendered an authentic presentment of the flag. It was a sketch of the Royal Savage (Arnold’s flag vessel on Lake Champlain in the battle of October, 1776). An ensign was depicted flying at the mast-head. This flag displayed the British union - the combined crosses of St. George and St. Andrew - in the usual upper corner, but the field had been changed from the solid red into alternate stripes of red and white. It was doubtless the union jack in the corner of the flag hoisted at Cambridge that caused the English to misinterpret it - to suppose that the Americans intended to submit once more to the rule of George the Third.

The colonial Union flag of thirteen stripes was also displayed in Pennsylvania during the year. A letter describing the departure of the American fleet under Admiral Hopkins from Philadelphia, in February, says it sailed “amidst the acclamations of thousands assembled on the joyful occasion, under display of a Union flag, with thirteen stripes in the field, emblematical of the thirteen united colonies.”

After allegiance to the British crown had been thrown off, the jack bearing the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew became inappropriate, and on the 14th of June, 1777, the Continental Congress passed the following resolution:

Resolved, That the flag of the United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white, on a blue field, representing a new constellation.

The illustration represents the ceremony of raising the new colonial flag. The scene depicts the interior of the fortifications on Prospect Hill, looking southeast across the Charles River toward Bartons Point in Boston.

The colonial troops, while much better organized than ever before, were still without a regular uniform, the occasional buckskin hunting dress of the Southern riflemen or of the frontiersmen being in picturesque contrast to the bucolic homespun of the New England minute-men.

Washington’s uniform is described in a letter written July 20, 1775, thus: “His dress is a blue coat with buff-colored facings, a rich epaulette on each shoulder, buff underdress, and an elegant small sword; a black cockade in his hat.”

Three of the cannon used at this time are now planted upon Cambridge’s common. They date from the reign of George the Second.

The profile of Boston, it may be said, has been rendered as carefully as possible from contemporary drawings and prints of the period. Edes & Gills North American for 1770 contains an engraving by Paul Revere, entitled “Landing of the Troops in Boston, 1768,” which gives an approximate view of that city, with its beacon, towers, and spires. Besides this, Lieutenant Williams of the Royal Welsh Fusileers, while stationed in Boston under General Gage, made a panoramic view in colors of the country surrounding the city. A copy of this drawing is in the cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The vessel in the middle distance represents one of the British war-ships guarding the approaches to the city.

Note: for some reason, when I first posted this I titled DeLand’s picture “Raising the First National Flag, January 1, 1776” but the correct title should be “Raising the First American Flag, January 1, 1776”.

Ticket to Pyle

On December 4, 1903, Howard Pyle and his wife, Anne, traveled from Chicago to Indianapolis via the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway. They arrived at 2:40 p.m. and were met by Will David Howe, a professor of English at Butler College (and later an editor and publisher in New York). Howe had tried to get Pyle to come lecture in Indianapolis in 1902, but the ever-busy Pyle begged off, explaining:

I am not only writing a book [The Story of King Arthur and His Knights] and conducting a class and building a house, but I have so many other engagements ahead of me that I hardly know how I shall carry them. Besides I shall be able next season to give you a much better thought out discourse than I could possible build together this year.

So the plan went on hold until 1903, when Pyle was able to coordinate well-paying visits to both Indianapolis and Chicago in one week-long trip. At the Art Institute of Chicago, he lectured on “The Art of the Age,” met more informally with the instructors and students (including a 19-year-old Harvey Dunn, who would join Pyle’s school the following November), and attended the opening of a one-man-show of some 110 of his pictures.

“As my lecture in Chicago will be more directly addressed to artists it will probably have many practical suggestions which will be well to omit in your lecture,” Pyle informed Howe. “Accordingly I will both concentrate and condense my Chicago words for Indianapolis.”

Unfortunately, no manuscript or transcript “The Art of the Age” has yet turned up, but in describing an earlier version of it Pyle said that he had “endeavored...to explain my understanding of the difference between the Art of the past and the Art that is demanded by the present age.... [and] stated very clearly and concisely my opinion that our age and our times require an art that, if not distinctly different from the Art of the past, is, at least, an adaptation and completion of the art of the past to fit our present needs.”

At any rate, at 8:00 p.m. on December 4th, Pyle “spoke to a large audience in chapel hall at Butler College” - reported the Indianapolis Morning Star - under the auspices of (and, perhaps, restricted to members and guests of) the Irvington Athenaeum. The paper also noted that “Classes were dispensed with and a reception was given Mr. Pyle at the college residence.”

The next evening, Mr. and Mrs. Pyle left Indianapolis on a 6:50 p.m. train. “Our trip home was most comfortable and the six children welcomed us with open arms,” said Anne in a thank-you letter to Howe. And Pyle’s students may have been equally welcoming: “Mr. Pyle is in Chicago,” wrote N. C. Wyeth to his mother, right after the Pyles had embarked on their trip, “and we are left for a whole week to battle alone with our troubles, and when we feel blue we’ll have no kind and powerful guardian to come in and cheer us up.”

A Typical Yankee Named Hoyt

“Jack Frost’s Harvest” by Philip L. Hoyt in Harper’s Weekly for December 6, 1902

In an article N. C. Wyeth wrote about Howard Pyle - published in the Christian Science Monitor one hundred years ago today - he discussed an unnamed Pyle student:

Mr. Pyle's inordinate ability as a teacher lay primarily in his sense of penetration; to read beneath the crude lines on paper the true purpose, to detect therein our real inclinations and impulses. In short, to unlock our personalities. This power was in no wise a superficial method handed out to those who would receive. We received in proportion to that which was fundamentally within us.

I recall an instance as an illustration. One member, an ungainly lad from the back country of northern New England, found his way into Pyle classes. He had dreamed, in his remote village, of becoming an artist; of picturing his visions of cities he had never seen, and of the lives of the people therein.

He had come into the composition class week after week, with sketches of society folk and kindred subjects. They were, naturally, unconvincing and poor, but Mr. Pyle’s interest in them did not flag. Meanwhile he assiduously gathered from the fellow accounts of his life in the woods, of breaking snow roads, of gathering maple sap, of log driving, of corn huskings, and a myriad things. It began to dawn upon the Vermonter that his own life at home, the incidents of his own north country which he knew and loved were interesting, yes, intensely interesting. His pictures at once gained in vitality and importance. With Mr. Pyle's trenchant help, he had found himself. I doubt if Howard Pyle ever had a student that did not at some time or other experience some such awakening as this while under his direction.

This “ungainly lad” was Philip Langly Hoyt, born November 2, 1873, in Wentworth, New Hampshire, a few miles from the Vermont border. The son of a farmer, Hoyt studied with Pyle at the Drexel Institute, won a scholarship to the 1899 Summer School of Illustration at Chadds Ford, and was selected by Pyle to join the nucleus of his own art school when he founded it in 1900.

Hoyt seems to have taken fellow New Englander Wyeth under his wing when the latter arrived in Wilmington in 1902. In an error-ridden letter home, Wyeth wrote of him:

The fellow is a typical Yankee named Hoyt. He’s from Vermont [sic]. Perfect Habits. Shrewd and as economical as possible.

I had to get an easle of course and Pyle could get a $25 one for 12.60. Hoyt says Don’t ye dew it! Make it. He made a slendid one for himself, lumber (hard pine), iron fixings and all cost four dollars or a little less. Now it’s quite a piece of mechanism and needs a cabinetmaker’s skill to make one so I bought his for five dollars and he’s making himself a new one making a few improvments (which is to his great delight).

Hoyt remained in Wilmington until about 1904 or so, when he moved to Boston. Eventually he abandoned illustration and although he may not have actually lived in Vermont prior to meeting Wyeth, Hoyt did wind up there later: on the 1930 Census he is listed as a construction contractor in Hartford in Windsor County. He died in Vermont at the age of 90 in March 1964.

Photograph taken in Chadds Ford, PA, showing Pyle and his students seeing off Philip Hoyt, on or about September 1, 1899, at the close of the second Summer School of Illustration. From left to right: Robert L. Mason, Emlem McConnell, Frank Schoonover, Howard Pyle, Annie Hailey, Sarah Stilwell, Ellen Bernard Thompson, Anna Whelan Betts, Stanley Arthurs, Philip Hoyt (in straw boater), Bertha Corson Day.

A Semi-Lost Howard Pyle Student

Portrait of Elisabeth Moore Hallowell by Violet Oakley (via Pook and Pook)

In 1872, Howard Pyle, 19 and fresh out of art school, rented a room in the Grand Opera House in Wilmington and advertised that he would teach “drawing, sketching, and painting in oils.” Whether anyone took him up on the offer is still in question, however. Not long after his mother’s death in 1885, Pyle took his sister Katharine under his wing and into his studio and helped establish her career as an illustrator. And then in May 1894 he accepted a teaching position at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia. But even before Pyle began his course on “Practical Illustration” that October, he agreed to help another artist.

Her name was Elisabeth Moore Hallowell (1861-1910) and today is the 118th anniversary of her first lesson with Pyle. She initially approached Pyle by letter on June 14, 1894, and he replied the next day:

I do not know just how much assistance I could be to you in the matter of pen drawing. It is a medium which I use but very little, except for the lighter and more decorative kind of illustrative work. If I can help you I shall be glad to do so.

He added that “if you could bring your work to me every week, say, on Saturday afternoons, I would be very glad to criticize it for you and to give you such suggestions as I can - I shall not charge you anything for such criticism.” Then - on 19th - Pyle told her to meet him on Saturday, June 21st at his then-residence, “Delamore Place,” an airy old mansion at the corner of Clayton and Maple Streets. I gather he didn’t have her come to his studio either for propriety, or because he only worked till midday on Saturdays, or because he was doing a lot of work at home at that time (a number of his illustrations from 1893-96 are indeed set at Delamore).

Whether Miss Hallowell did in fact see Pyle every Saturday that summer is in doubt: he went on a whirlwind trip, for instance, to Onteora, New York, in late June or early July 1894, and also spent days and maybe weeks at a time at his family’s cottage in Rehoboth, Delaware. Evidently, however, she did make periodic visits: on September 20th, for example, Pyle wrote that he could probably see her on the 29th, but that “I should like you that time to come to my studio instead of my house. You will find me there between the hours of three and five. The address is 1305 Franklin Street.”

Subsequently, Hallowell continued to seek Pyle’s help both informally and at Drexel, where she attended his classes: in a January 1896 letter, for example, Pyle said, “I will try, unless I miss my train, to be at your room at nine o’clock, and will give you an hour’s criticism between then and ten o’clock.” And although primarily a botanical artist, she made at least one Pylesque illustration - “Betsy Ross Making the First American Flag” - for Leslie’s Weekly in 1896.

Surely, this was produced under Pyle’s influence - if not his direct supervision. But it’s not clear how long their association continued. In 1897 the Macmillan Company announced the publication of Hallowell’s Elementary Drawing: A Series of Practical Papers for Beginners and touted it as “a very practical interesting book, with suggestions as to the best methods of grouping, management of light and shade, and other essentials of composition, all intended to give reliable help to students who are filling their first sketch-books.” I haven’t seen the book, or her articles in The Art Amateur which composed it, but perhaps some of it came out of what she learned from Pyle.

Hallowell later taught pen and ink drawing and was “Instructor in Charge of the Class in Illustration” at the Philadelphia Museum and School of Industrial Art. In 1902, she married author-naturalist-traveler-botanist-historian (etc.!) Charles Francis Saunders (1859-1942) and the two collaborated on a number of projects. In 1906, for the sake of for Elisabeth’s health they moved to California, where she died at age 49.

Incidentally, the portrait of Hallowell shown above was drawn by Violet Oakley, one of Pyle’s most celebrated Drexel students and, it seems, Hallowell’s friend.

Yes, Mr. Pyle, but...

“After all, it is the result of my words that will tell, and not the words themselves. If I may help and inspire young artists with an exalted idea of their mission, and if an improvement of their work is the result, then I shall have served my mission, and it will not matter in the least whether my words are recorded or not recorded.”

Howard Pyle to Marie-Marguerite Frechette, February 2, 1905.

“Out of a Gray Chaos”

“Paint your picture by means of the lights - imagine that you are bringing moving beings out of a gray chaos and not that you are drawing men with black paint.”

Howard Pyle as recorded by Ethel Pennewill Brown and Olive Rush, August 2, 1904.

H.P.S.A. Ahoy!

“The dim, shadowy forms of vessels riding at anchor in the night” by Howard Pyle (1889)

If only. In the correspondence of Howard Pyle’s students there are some intriguing hints of things that, unfortunately, never came to be. Allen Tupper True’s letter of July 29, 1902 (now at the Archives of American Art), describes a plan that was later scuttled:

What do you think is the latest thing that his brain has evolved? He is already making arrangements for having the school afloat next summer. We are going to charter a steamer - or rather a schooner and with part of the vessel for Mr. Pyle and his family and part for the school we are going to float all summer. There will be a bully chance to paint marines and if things pan out right the whole expense will be borne by this scheme. Mr. Pyle is to write an article or two which we shall illustrate and the proceeds are calculated to be enough to pay our expenses. This is the nucleus of the plan and Mr. Pyle’s plans usually go through. If next summer’s cruise is successful we will the next year go to the West Indies etc. etc. Do you wonder why we like Mr. Pyle?

[Note: The above picture comes from Part One of “Jamaica, New and Old” by Howard Pyle in Harper’s Monthly, January 1890. The original - whereabouts unknown - is in blue watercolor or ink on paper or Bristol board.]

Howard Pyle’s Palate

The 1899 Drexel Institute Summer School of Illustration dining at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania*

Howard Pyle’s taste in food has always fascinated me, and a dozen years ago I was asked to provide some information on exactly that topic for a book. Rather than draw up a simple list of his favorite dishes, I wrote a brief essay, and the compiler later asked if I’d consent to it being quoted in full. I said “Absolutely!” and by-and-by the book was published as The Artist's Palate.

It was a handsome thing, full of interesting anecdotes, illustrations, recipes, and even a foreword by Mario Batali. But I was chagrined to see that - unbeknownst to me - an editor or proofreader had made several “corrections” to my text:

• “Chadd’s Ford” had become “Chadsford”
• “Apollinaris water” had become “Appolinaire’s water”
• “’tis good invalid food” had become “’tis good and invalid food”

Luckily, though, they had also “corrected” my surname by leaving off the terminal “r” which lessened my embarrassment somewhat. I guess. So, for the record, here’s what I originally sent:

When Howard Pyle landed his first important commission, he rewarded himself by immediately taking a friend to Delmonico’s where they “had a lunch of all the delicacies in season and out of season.” Thereafter, as his success and circle of famous friends grew, dinners at Delmonico’s and other such eateries were regular events in Pyle’s life. He was invited to a number of lunches and dinners at the White House and attended banquets honoring the likes of Mark Twain and other luminaries. The menus at these grand feasts were nearly as remarkable as the guest-lists. Pyle’s taste for fine food had its limits, however: when served truffles in Italy he said, “They taste like sewer-gas smells.”

By and large, the food Pyle is known to have enjoyed is of the comfort variety: ice cream, roasted chestnuts, popcorn, cake, pretzels, lager beer, dried fruit, chocolates, apple cider, ginger ale, waffles, turkey, and pie. He once offered to send some terrapin to a sick friend, saying “’tis good invalid food.”

While teaching at Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, Pyle occasionally invited some of his students to lunch. He liked to expose them to new dishes, but he also knew the power of food as an inducement to work or as a reward for work well done. Once, at the Hotel Bartram, he said to the waiter, “I want to introduce these boys and girls to the famous Philadelphia pepper pot. Bring them a large dish and a large quantity of this famous Philadelphia pepper pot for I want them to know it and because I expect a great deal of work from them this afternoon.” On hot days, Pyle’s penchant for lemonade spurred him to lead his summer school students on long bicycle trips from Chadd’s Ford to the one restaurant in Wilmington that made it especially with Apollinaris water.

Pyle peppered his pictures and prose with scenes of eating and drinking. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood in particular is full of jolly feasts. The activities of Robin and his men whet their appetites, and they satisfy themselves by “roasting juicy steaks of venison, pheasants, capons, and fresh fish from the river,” by devouring great pasties “compounded of juicy meats of divers kinds made savory with onions, both meat and onions being mingled with a good rich gravy,” and by washing it all down with pots of “humming ale” or a “goat-skin full of stout March beer.” In one memorable passage, Robin fantasizes about his ideal meal: “Firstly, I would have a sweet brown pie of tender larks; mark ye, not dry cooked, but with a good sop of gravy to moisten it withal. Next, I would have a pretty pullet, fairly boiled, with tender pigeons’ eggs, cunningly sliced, garnishing the platter around. With these I would have a long, slim loaf of wheaten bread that hath been baked upon the hearth; it should be warm from the fire, with glossy brown crust, the color of the hair of mine own maid, Marian, and this same crust should be as crisp and brittle as the thin white ice that lies across the furrows in the early winter’s morning. These will do for the more solid things; but with these I must have three pottles, fat and round, one full of Malmsey, one of Canary, and one brimming full of mine own dear lusty sack.”

Doubtless these delicious descriptions reflected Pyle’s own palate.

* The above photograph was probably taken by Frank Schoonover, since it otherwise shows all of the 1899 Summer School students. Maybe that’s his cap on the bench, marking his seat. Howard Pyle, is at the head of the table in the foreground. At the opposite end is his secretary, Anna W. Hoopes (at least it looks more like her than his wife, Anne). On Pyle’s left (from left to right) are Robert L. Mason, Annie L. Hailey (or Haley, a Drexel student who served as a model), Anna Whelan Betts, Emlen McConnell, and Sarah S. Stilwell (with the long braid). On Pyle’s right (from left to right) are: Philip L. Hoyt, Stanley M. Arthurs, Ellen Bernard Thompson, Clyde O. DeLand, and Bertha Corson Day (obscured by Pyle, but her hairstyle is distinctive).

NOTE of August 20, 2014: I’ve since discovered that the photo was taken not at Chadds Ford as had been noted previously, but at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on August 20, 1899.

Rules

“The art-student learns rules for doing things but all the rules in the world would never make a picture.

“A great picture can only be made through inspiration and truth, and rules are of use only for correcting.”

Howard Pyle on Monday, July 25, 1904, as recorded by Ethel Pennewill Brown and Olive Rush

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.

Howard Pyle Quits Drexel Institute

I’ve read in more than one place that, once Howard Pyle decided to establish his own school, he resigned from the Drexel Institute (in a February 14, 1900, letter) and left immediately.

That isn’t what happened. For one thing, Pyle’s sense of duty would have kept him on until his contract ran out at the end of the spring semester - or at least until a replacement was found. Besides that, though, this item appeared in The New York Evening Post of Saturday, June 16, 1900:

Last week on Wednesday evening the pupils of Howard Pyle gave him a farewell reception at Drexel Institute, Philadelphia. It was an occasion of welcoming the coming as well as speeding the parting guest, for B. West Clinedinst, the instructor who is to succeed Mr. Pyle, was also present. Speeches were made by both of the men, Mr. Pyle was visibly affected by his leave-taking.

Pyle’s Art Students’ League Students?

Here is another news item about Howard Pyle’s Art Students’ League lectures and critiques of 1904-05. This one comes from the International Studio:

The Art Students' League has been fortunate enough to obtain the services of Mr. Howard Pyle for the coming winter. His class will not be of the usual academic order, as Mr. Pyle particularly wishes to help young artists as well as students. The course will consist of a series of critical lectures on Composition, the class meeting on alternate Saturdays and lasting two hours, from four to six o'clock. The first hour there will be a general talk on composition, and the second hour will be devoted to criticising the work of those who pass Mr. Pyle's standard. The less advanced pupils will, however, have the benefit of his criticisms as well as his lectures. The first lecture will be held on Saturday, December 3. The tuition fee for this class will be $2.00 a month.

This arrangement was very much like the one Pyle had during his first year as an instructor at the Drexel Institute in 1894-95. What puzzles me is that there were plenty of League members and artists who attended these lectures and had their work criticized by Pyle, but unless they subsequently went to Wilmington for further Pylean guidance they do not appear on the many lists of Pyle students that have been assembled over the years. On the other hand, even those who had only fleeting contact with Pyle at the Drexel Institute (or in Wilmington, for that matter) are considered Pyle students.

But Pyle himself looked on those he instructed in New York as his students - at least if what he wrote to Hugo Ballin on March 8, 1905, is any indication: “I have a few pupils at home and abroad to whom I like to apply when I find myself in need of help, and you see I include you in that limited category.” The American Art News of March 25, 1905, also said, “Mr. Pyle was especially interested in the compositions of Hugo Ballin and Remington Schuyler; their work he considers to be of great promise.” As far as I know, however, Ballin has been conspicuously absent from the “Pyle student” rolls - and I don’t think he’s an isolated case.

Howard Pyle Lectures at the Art Students’ League

“It has just been announced at the Art Students' League that Howard Pyle will give a series of lectures on Composition, every other Saturday, from 4 to 6. The lectures are open to all students on payment of a small fee, but those wishing to put compositions up for criticism must first submit a sample of their work.”

The American Art News, November 26, 1904

Howard Pyle’s Sketch Club

On November 24, 1902, Allen Tupper True wrote home to his father:

…Mr. Pyle’s latest innovation is a “Sketch Club” to meet once a week when we and he can get together around a long table in his studio for a “stag” evening. The event of the evening is to be an impromptu pen and ink composition the subject for which will be assigned just before commencing. Mr. Pyle is to sketch too and his idea seems to be that he shall be one of a jolly crowd for one evening a week. We will have beer, ginger ale and good tobacco which in this case do not mean as coarse as an affair as you might think.…

Pyle’s “innovation” was something he resurrected from his time in New York in the late 1870s - from the Salmagundi Sketch Club, in particular.

The compositional subject was just a word or phrase - “Idiocy,” “The End,” “The Conquerer,” “The Challenge” - and after it was assigned (or, perhaps, drawn from a hat, etc.) the artists would draw and eat and drink and talk and smoke.

Just imagine the groups that assembled each week or so in 1902-03: N. C. Wyeth, William J. Aylward, Philip R. Goodwin, Arthur Becher, George Harding, Allen True, Clifford Ashley, Henry Peck, Thornton Oakley, et al.... And the artist whose impromptu creation was deemed best would go home with Howard Pyle’s drawing.

November 14, 1904

“To illustrate requires a subjugating of oneself and that is the very best kind of a drill for an artist. For all know that true Art can flourish only when all thought of self is banished and the mind free to follow Truth.”

Howard Pyle as quoted by Ethel Pennewill Brown and Olive Rush, November 14, 1904

November 10, 1894

The following notes were written by Bertha Corson Day during Howard Pyle’s sixth lecture on illustration at the Drexel Institute, November 10, 1894:

Finish your work - but do not labor it

Begin finishing on the eyes of the principal figure

Study proportion*

Avoid giving a brand new look to things

In sunlight exaggerate the simplicity of effects

Avoid copying the strained expression of the face of the model

Strength is not produced by strong contrasts

[* Pyle specifically recommended the textbooks of Bertram Windle - no doubt his The Proportions of the Human Body (1892) - and another writer, whose name I have yet to decipher.]