Howard Pyle’s Boots

I’ve mentioned my mini-obsession with Howard Pyle’s boots before. They’re the ones that show up again and again in over 25 years’ worth of Pyle’s pictures - and then, perhaps more famously, in Andrew Wyeth’s “Trodden Weed.” Well, now you can see the boots themselves in a BBC documentary on Wyeth hosted by Michael Palin - at about the 17:25 minute mark. (Later on, too - starting at 47:58 - Pyle’s summer home at Chadd’s Ford is featured when Palin visits its later owners, the Sipalas.)

Andrew Wyeth and Howard Pyle

Andrew Wyeth - who was a huge fan of Howard Pyle’s work, who owned quite a few originals (including this amazing one) as well as Pyle’s oft-used boots, and who spurred Pyle's grandson Howard Brokaw to amass the largest Pyle collection in private hands (since presented to the Brandywine River Museum) - would have turned 96 today. Here are two (only two?) past posts which reference him. Here, too, is a video of Wyeth’s studio with glimpses of two Pyle-related items: a 1900 poster for To Have & To Hold (hanging low on the wall, about 26 seconds in) and a 1910 photo of Pyle taken by Paul Strayer.

“A Study”

“A Study” in charcoal with white highlights on paper (19 x 31.5") by Howard Pyle was exhibited at the Second Exhibition of the Los Angeles Architectural Club, January 12-25, 1911. It was loaned by Scott Quintin of Los Angeles and a reproduction of it appeared in the catalogue. So far so good. But when did Pyle make it? 1900? 1910? Sometime in between? And how did Quintin get it? I just don't know.

In 1911, however, Scott Quintin (1884-1963) was an architect and from about 1907 on Howard Pyle grew more and more anxious to obtain mural commissions from architects. So did Pyle send it to the exhibition (via Quintin) as a way to drum up interest in his work? Or did he give it or sell it to Quintin, who exhibited it without Pyle's knowledge?

On the other hand, according to Who’s Who in the Pacific Southwest (Los Angeles: Times-Mirror Printing & Binding House, 1913), Scott Quintin studied free-hand and architectural drawing at the Drexel Institute between 1897 and 1904. So was “A Study” something a teenaged Quintin acquired during his Drexel days? Was it something Pyle drew in front of his class as part of a demonstration and then, say, left behind, only to be secreted home by Quintin (who, as far as I know, was not a Pyle student)? Or did Pyle simply give it to Quintin sometime between 1897 and 1900?

Well, at least we do know that the cavalier in “A Study” is wearing the same boots which turn up in dozens of Pyle’s pictures - the same boots which were “inherited” by his student Stanley Arthurs, then purchased by Betsy James Wyeth, then presented to her husband at Christmas 1950, then worn by Andrew Wyeth as he took recuperative rambles over the fields around Chadds Ford, and then featured by him (sans buckles) in his 1951 “self-portrait” called “Trodden Weed.”

I want those boots!

Lafayette’s Headquarters, 1898

I like to identify real-life objects or settings that Howard Pyle incorporated into his pictures: the boots that show up again and again in over 20 years’ worth of work (and that also appear in Andrew Wyeth’s “Trodden Weed”) or the strong box he bought in Jamaica that decorates some of his pirate paintings. As for settings, here’s an example...

In 1898, Pyle created a Summer School of Illustration (under the auspices of the Drexel Institute) in Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania. The Pyles set up house at Lafayette Hall, an old mansion across the road from Turner’s Mill, where Pyle and his 15 students had their studios. The male students boarded at Washington’s Headquarters, near the village, and, as Pyle said in a letter to E. L. Burlingame (now in the Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons at Princeton University):

Close to me I have established the girls of the Class - nearly all of them living in a quaint little building which was Lafayette’s headquarters at the time of the Battle of Brandywine.... It is a beautiful little place perched upon the side of a hill, overlooking the stretch of valley to the airy hills beyond, and surrounded by old stone walls with a horse-block and with great buttonwood trees at the sides and sloping fields around.

Angel DeCora, one of the six female students, painted a view of the house, and below is a postcard which shows it a few years later.

As usual, besides teaching that summer, Pyle had illustrations to make, including several for “Old Captain,” a story by Myles Hemenway for the December 1898 Harper’s Monthly. And, as you can see below, Pyle used Lafayette’s Headquarters in his frontispiece titled “And you shall not hinder me,” preserving much of the porch, but transforming the distant Pennsylvania woods and fields into a small harbor town in the south of England.