“Pyle’s illustrations for my poem are lovely”

“...Pyle’s illustrations for my poem are lovely in the Wide Awake...”

From the diary of Edmund Clarence Stedman, November 21, 1887

A Victim to Science, 1883

“A Victim to Science” by Howard Pyle (Harper’s Young People, November 20, 1883)

Howard Pyle and A Peculiar People

“The Kloster” by Howard Pyle, 1880

The following is part of a letter Howard Pyle, then in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, wrote to Anne Poole, his fiancée, on November 19, 1880:

Bur-r-r-ruh! but it was cold today. I managed to potter along tolerably well in the morning, sitting in the sun and sketching the old buildings of the Cloister. But when I undertook in the afternoon to go around and get another view, sitting in the shade, I had to resign. I worked along for some time with stiff fingers and chilled bones, but when I got to painting and the water I was using froze in little cakes all over the picture, I absolutely could not go on. I would have stuck at it in spite of chilled fingers if it had not been for that.

…I went in to warm my hands and the strict head sister took them into her own puffy palms in the most motherly way, saying with a surprised air “dey is golt,” just as if it were a land of Egypt out in the shadow of the woodshed. I thought it a good time to bone her again about having her picture taken, but she still firmly declined in Pennsylvania Dutch.…

As I could do no more at the buildings I went over to see my ancient friend Pfautz. I showed him the sketch I had made and he was interested. Then I asked him to sit for his picture. Here his daughter put in her word, objecting most strongly. I think the old man rather liked the idea. He had the queerest old trousers that might have been worn by Noah anterior to his cruise - yellow with age and patched with parti-colored remnants - oh! so picturesque! His daughter thought it would be ungodly to have his picture taken. I thought she meant ungodly for me to draw it. “I’ll take the responsibility,” I said. “You better be responsible for yourself,” said she, “one soul ought to be enough for you.” Then I quoted Scripture and she answered with twice as much. Then I appealed to the old man. “She will scoldt me,” said he, “and make it onpleasant.” To make a long story short I finally prevailed, provided I would not sketch more than his head.

This was not exactly what I wanted, but half a loaf is better than no bread, so I acceded to this stipulation.

The old man followed me out of the house when I was done. “Vas you going to publish that in Harper’s Weekly?” said he.

“Harper’s Monthly, if you will let me. I hope you won’t object.”

“Ho-no-no,” said he - then after a pause, “but don’t tell my daughter.”

“Oh no.”

Again he hesitated. “You’ll put my name, won’t you?”

“Why I don’t know.”

“I t’inks you petter - ain’t my name’s John B. Pfautz. John Bauer Pfautz - aigh? (with a rising inflection). And you might send me one of the papers - aigh?”…

“My Cicerone” (portrait of John Bauer Pfautz) by Howard Pyle, 1880

The Battle of “The Battle of Bunker Hill”

On November 18, 1897, Howard Pyle wrote to Joseph Hawley Chapin, Art Editor of Scribner’s Magazine:

…I send you today the Bunker Hill picture. It is quite carefully studied, and I think, excepting the portraiture which of course has to be idealized, it is a correct view of the battle.…

The ship of war firing in the distance is the Lively. In the remoter distance I have represented Copp’s Hill with the boat yard at the foot of the hill as nearly as I could represent it from the maps of the period. The smoke arising from the remoter distance is being discharged from a fortification upon Copp’s Hill. Charlestown lies back of the hill and the black smoke arising is from the burning houses.…

It’s worth noting that this description formed the basis of the caption for “The Battle of Bunker Hill” when it was printed in Scribner’s Magazine for February 1898, illustrating the second installment of Henry Cabot Lodge’s The Story of the Revolution:

The scene represents the second attack and is taken from the right wing of the Fifty-second Regiment, with a company of grenadiers in the foreground. The left wing of the regiment, under command of the major, has halted, and is firing a volley; the right wing is just marching past to take its position for firing. The ship-of-war firing from the middle distance is the Lively; in the remoter distance is the smoke from the battery on Copp’s Hill. The black smoke to the right is from the burning houses of Charlestown.

According to some notes taken during a 1949 conversation between Frank Schoonover and Gertrude Brincklé:

When Mr. Pyle was collecting information and ideas for this painting he wrote to the Admiralty office in London for details about the real formation in the battle, but got very little information. He made the composition from what they told him, and from his own imagination. At first the drummers were marching on the right side, and then he put them in the rear where they are now.

The version seen here was also Pyle’s second try: he was unhappy after a week’s work on the first, so he slashed the canvas with a sword. And then he painted this one in four days.

Charles Scribner’s Sons was impressed enough with Pyle’s “Battle of Bunker Hill” and “Fight on Lexington Common” to consider reproducing them - and the other ten pictures he was contracted to do - in color and selling them by subscription. This never panned out. But the publisher did decide to send an exhibition of illustrations for The Story of the Revolution around the country while the history was being serialized - a canny promotional stunt.

Pyle balked. He told Joe Chapin on December 30, 1897, that “to exhibit my pictures in their present partially finished state would, in my opinion, be injurious to them and to me, and that I am accordingly compelled to lay aside my other work and to retouch them whether I choose to do so or not.” However, he conceded - under protest - in the same letter.

But Pyle wasn’t being entirely frank, and a few days later he confided to Charles Scribner II: “It may not be a probability, but at least it is a very strong possibility that this set of pictures, when completed, may be purchased by the Congressional Library Committee, to be hung in the Library Building in Washington.” Pyle was worried, though, that key government officials would see his “unfinished” works on display and deem them unworthy of so high-profile a home as the Library of Congress. He was also concerned that showing “The Battle of Bunker Hill” as is in Boston might jeopardize his chances for a commission to paint a mural on the same topic for the Massachusetts State House. He explained, “The picture was sent to you very hastily and in an unfinished state, because of the demand of the Magazine to have it in the Art Department by a certain given date. I was aware that it was crude in its effect and unfinished in all of its details - but had no idea that it was so crude in color as it proved to be when I saw it again and with fresh eyes.”

In the end, Pyle indeed tweaked “The Battle of Bunker Hill” somewhat: compare, for example, the clouds in the magazine plate (in black and white, above) and the original (in color, below). Ultimately, however, for all his hand-wringing and the efforts of his friends with influence, both the Washington and Boston schemes collapsed.

Howard Pyle Didn’t Sleep Here

But Howard Pyle did eat a meal and write a letter here. Where? Why, the Mount Vernon House, run by Zephaniah Undercuffler in Ephrata, Pennsylvania - 130 years ago today. As he complained to his fiancée, Anne Poole, who was back home in Wilmington:

...You see where I am (Ephrata) - and the name spelled right thanks to being printed. But I am not going to stay here - oh no! I am going back to Lancaster tonight. And I am going to stay in Lancaster and am going to get one meal at least in Lancaster. The unpronounceable proprietor of this Mount Vernon House told me today that this was a Dutch house, kept in Dutch style, and that I must help myself accordingly, which I did, to fat pork, turnips, diminutive sweet potatoes, dried peaches, and an indescribable pie, but oh my! - never mind, I won’t say anything about my poor stomach just here.… I am going back to Lancaster tonight, as I said, for dear only knows what the German bed may be....

A day or so earlier, Pyle had arrived in the area to begin gathering data on the religious community of “Dunkers” for a Harper’s Monthly article. A few months later, Scribner’s Monthly (soon to be re-christened The Century) perhaps unwittingly dispatched two artists to Ephrata to illustrate a similar piece for that magazine. Joseph Pennell, one of the two artists, later recalled:

We went at the drawings with fury, but, to our horror, we found that Howard Pyle had been there, for he had left behind an unfinished drawing which was preserved in the hotel. We said nothing, but worked harder and faster, fearing that any month Pyle’s article might appear in Harper's and ours never be printed... and, though we trembled every month when Harper’s was announced, we came out in The Century years before he did in Harper’s.

Indeed, “A Colonial Monastery” by Oswald W. Seidensticker, illustrated by Pennell and Henry Rankin Poore, came out in December 1881. But Pyle’s “A Peculiar People” only appeared in October 1889.

Above is one of the pictures that Pyle didn’t leave behind (at the Mount Vernon House, I mean). And rightly so. It’s called “The Kiss of Peace” and again shows the sort of “transitional” drawing style that Pyle employed in the early 1880s and which I’ve pointed out here and here and here. It could almost pass as a drypoint.

The Return from Deerfield

“The Return from Deerfield” by Howard Pyle, 1897

The town of Deerfield, Massachusetts, came up in conversation recently and it prompted me to exhume this picture from my files. Howard Pyle painted “The Return from Deerfield” for Volume I of A Half-Century of Conflict, included in France and England in North America, Part Sixth, which formed Volume XI of the The Works of Francis Parkman (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1897).

The original 14 x 24" oil (in part color) belongs to the University of Delaware. And here is a blurry photo of the same (swiped from UD’s website, with apologies) if only to give some idea of Pyle’s use of red in the cap, robe, kerchief, etc. and the “colder” overall feel of the piece, which is lost in the warm browns and yellows of the photogravure.

The calm demeanor of the standing figure always puzzled me: I guess because I was misreading the title as “The Return to Deerfield.” But in finally bothering to read the chapter Pyle illustrated, I now understand that it shows the French and Native American forces marching back to Canada after raiding the village and taking a number of villagers captive. The detail of the standing figure’s collar indicates that he is the cold-blooded Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville, who commanded the attack in the winter of 1704. The woman at his snowshoed feet is Eunice, wife of the Reverend John Williams. As Parkman says:

The prisoners were the property of those who had taken them. Williams had two masters; one of the three who had seized him having been shot in the attack on the house of Stebbins. His principal owner was a surly fellow who would not let him speak to the other prisoners; but as he was presently chosen to guard the rear, the minister was left in the hands of his other master, who allowed him to walk beside his wife and help her on the way. Having borne a child a few weeks before, she was in no condition for such a march, and felt that her hour was near. Williams speaks of her in the strongest terms of affection. She made no complaint, and accepted her fate with resignation. “We discoursed,” he says, “of the happiness of those who had God for a father and friend, as also that it was our reasonable duty quietly to submit to His will.” Her thoughts were for her remaining children, whom she commended to her husband’s care. Their intercourse was short. The Indian who had gone to the rear of the train soon returned, separated them, ordered Williams to the front, “and so made me take a last farewell of my dear wife, the desire of my eyes and companion in many mercies and afflictions.” They came soon after to Green River, a stream then about knee-deep, and so swift that the water had not frozen. After wading it with difficulty, they climbed a snow-covered hill beyond. The minister, with strength almost spent, was permitted to rest a few moments at the top; and as the other prisoners passed by in turn, he questioned each for news of his wife. He was not left long in suspense. She had fallen from weakness in fording the stream, but gained her feet again, and, drenched in the icy current, struggled to the farther bank, when the savage who owned her, finding that she could not climb the hill, killed her with one stroke of his hatchet. Her body was left on the snow till a few of her townsmen, who had followed the trail, found it a day or two after, carried it back to Deerfield, and buried it in the churchyard.

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

Who (or Which) Shall Be Captain?

“I think that pirate duel is the most terrific thing I ever saw. I had almost all the sensations I have enjoyed at a prize fight. Oh if I were only a pluto I’d have that in the middle of my shack and when I wanted to be lifted out of the dreary run of existence I would take a look. As I grow older and colder I do not fail to remember that fighting - drinking and the women are after all the big primitive sensations - everything else is B. Flat.”

So said Frederic Remington in a letter to Howard Pyle, written on November 13, 1908. “Who Shall Be Captain?” was one of thirty Pyle works then on display at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City. Harper and Brothers had the right to reproduce it, but they didn’t exercise that right for a couple of years: the picture appeared, at last, in the January 1911 Harper’s Monthly along with a poem called “The Buccaneers” by Don C. Seitz - and with the title tweaked to read “Which Shall Be Captain?” It also went by the name “The Fight on the Sands” at the Harper offices, according to Pyle.

The Delaware Art Museum now owns the original 32 x 48" oil on canvas. And, incidentally, the treasure chest was painted “from life” and can be seen in photos of Pyle’s studio; he bought it on one of his trips to Jamaica and then Thornton Oakley bought it at Pyle’s estate sale in 1912 (and rumor has it that it’s now in the vicinity of Chadds Ford).

I’ve always been of two minds about this picture: while it’s nicely painted, the exaggerated expressions of the onlookers - the cartoon scowls and goofily popping eyes - don’t sit well with me, and I find the composition more static than dramatic. Then again, if I were only a pluto I’d have it in the middle of my shack, too.

November 12, 1899

In the court of the [Drexel] Institute were displayed last week four historical paintings by Howard Pyle, of which “Jefferson Framing the Constitution” was one. They are all painted in the low tones Mr. Pyle invariably employs, and they are finished with the same conscientious thoroughness. Mr. Pyle is almost the only artist living who can finish a picture to the last detail and yet lose nothing of its artistic value. (The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 12, 1899)

Shown here is the engraving of the work as it appeared in Scribner’s Magazine for March 1898. So much for the “low tones.” But you can see what it should look like via the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies. The original painting (about 24 x 36") is at the Delaware Art Museum.

The Philadelphia Inquirer wasn’t quite right about the title, especially since Jefferson didn’t frame the Constitution. It’s rightfully called “Thomas Jefferson Writing the Declaration of Independence” and illustrated “The Story of the Revolution” by Henry Cabot Lodge.

In order to capture the effect of candlelight - and still see what he was doing - Pyle placed his model in a tent set up in his studio. He most likely painted this in late November 1897.

November 11, 1911

Two days after Howard Pyle died, muralist Edwin Howland Blashfield eulogized him in a letter to their mutual friend, architect Cass Gilbert:

Nov 11 1911

Dear Mr Gilbert

I was shocked to hear of Howard Pyle’s death and very very sorry too for I think he had before him years of work and I believe that his European trip would have put even more of interest into his beautiful talent. His canvas in the State Capitol of Minnesota is the finest battle-piece I’ve ever seen except that of the Bourget by De Neuville (which latter depends largely on its episodical quality).

His death is a very great loss

Yours

Edwin H Blashfield

I wish I had known him better

[The letter comes from the Cass Gilbert Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.]

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.]

Where Did Howard Pyle Die?

Unlike Howard Pyle’s place of birth, his place of death is not in dispute. It happened in the building shown here - 6 Via Garibaldi in Florence, Italy - at 4.30 a.m. on Thursday, November 9, 1911. A Pyle descendant has a copy of this photo, marked to show the precise location: the room with the lighter window (as opposed to the two darker windows) on the top floor.

On New Year’s Day of 1911, Pyle had described the family’s then new Florentine apartment to Stanley Arthurs and Frank Schoonover:

The rooms are very comfortable, and the house is one that was occupied by Lord Byron when he was here in Florence. We are in the third story of the house, which is not nearly so fashionable as the second, but it suits us admirably. The rooms all open out upon a passage-way, and the passage is reached by a flight of stone steps from the street which are really quite shut off from the apartments excepting for an entrance door with the locks and bolts of a prison.

Pyle’s daughter Phoebe felt a bit overwhelmed by the “tawdry magnificence” of the furnishings, but Pyle grew to enjoy the apartment in particular and the city in general. “It seems like home,” he wrote that September. “There is no turmoil there, and no upheaval, and if there is sickness there is a comfortable place to be.”

The two lower floors of the place were occupied for some years by another American, Dr. Charles Riggs Parke, who became, wrote Pyle, “one of the closest of my friends” and “my regular physician here in Florence.” But in a world without antibiotics, the doctor was no match for the Bright’s Disease (or uric acid poisoning?) which doomed his upstairs neighbor.

99 Years Gone

November 8, 1895

Last year I wrote about how Howard Pyle altered his painting “The Burial of Braddock” after it was first published in magazine and book form in 1896 and before it was sent to its new (and present) owner, the Boston Public Library, in 1897. Now, here’s a little something written on this day 115 years ago about the origins of the same work...

And in case Woodrow Wilson’s handwriting is difficult to read, here is a transcription:

Everett House, Union Square, New York.

8 Nov., 1895

My dear Mr. Pyle,

Your last letter came just as I was leaving home, and I had to bring it off with me to find time for an answer.

You will notice that Washington in his account of Braddock’s death says “near the Great Meadows,” careful Mr. Parkman says exactly the same, writing before the publication of W’s account. It would not be safe, I think, to take the picture of Braddock’s grave as a picture of Great Meadows. [Colonel Thomas] Dunbar’s camp at the time of B’s death was, I should judge, between Gist’s and Great Meadows, nearer the latter than the former. See map opposite page 438 of Winsor’s “Mississippi Basin,” on which Gist’s is called “Guests.”

In haste,

Cordially Yours,

Woodrow Wilson

Mr. Howard Pyle

Wilson, by the way, was writing from Everett House, a hotel on the north side of Union Square, at the corner of Fourth Avenue (now Park Avenue South) and 17th Street, right next to The Century Company - a fragment of which can be seen on the left side of this photo of the hotel from the Museum of the City of New York. The hotel was pulled down in 1908, but The Century offices (which Pyle visited somewhat frequently in connection with his work for St. Nicholas and The Century Magazine, etc.) are now home to a Barnes and Noble store.

[Note of November 8, 2013: I added a few details and links since first posting this]

At the Quill and Grill Club, November 8, 1883

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 5, 1881

"Suppose you let me take care of this young lady in future?" by Howard Pyle from Harper’s Weekly for November 5, 1881. It illustrates “John Paul” by an unknown author and shows yet another Pylean pen and ink technique - and an atypical one at that - as well as an atypically modern setting. It is of similar vintage and style to this drawing which I showed a while back. (Oh, and this one, too.)

November 5, 1889

A teeny, tiny (1.5 x 4.6"), untitled vignette from “Wisdom’s Wages and Folly’s Pay” by Howard Pyle. It debuted in the November 5, 1889, issue of Harper’s Young People and was later included in Twilight Land. It illustrates this passage:

When the cook saw what Babo had done he snatched up the rolling-pin, and made at him to pound his head to a jelly. But Babo jumped out of the window, and away he scampered, with the cook at his heels.

I scanned the piece at 300 dpi to make it easier to inspect the deft handiwork.

November 3, 1885

“The Children are sent to the Asylum.” I know how they feel. This lovely pen and ink (about 9 x 7.5") is typical post-Pepper-and-Salt-pre-Wonder-Clock Pyle. It made its one and only appearance in the November 3, 1885, issue of Harper's Young People, illustrating “The Book of Balbo” by Sherwood Ryse, the pseudonym of Alfred B. Starey, who was editor of the magazine at that time. After Starey died, Laurence Hutton (another Pyle friend) eulogized him in the pages of Harper’s Monthly (May 1894):

Harper’s Young People, although they did not know him, and perhaps never even heard his name, lost a good and faithful friend when Alfred B. Starey died last summer in New York. One who was long and intimately associated with him, in a professional as well as in a social way, can only say of him here, that he was as clean in morals as he was in intellect, that he won the respect and the confidence of all those with whom he was brought in contact, that no man of his years, or of his position, in his profession or out of it, was more sincerely liked or more deeply regretted, and that he never, in any society, said or did anything which his own sisters, or the Young People for whom he labored, might not have heard or seen.

The bound volume of the little magazine which he edited for seven years, and the first which has appeared since he passed away, is another and enduring stone in the monument which he helped to erect to himself. In Harper's Young People Mr. Starey put the very best of his life work. Although, of course, he did not die for it, he died in its service; and on every page, and in every line, it shows his critical instinct and his conscientious care.

November 3, 1878

Referring to this picture, Howard Pyle wrote to his mother on November 3, 1878:

The composition class at the [Art Students’] League still occupies much of my attention. The subject last week was “Zekle’s Courtship.” I did not make a composition myself, however, as I was quite busy last week working on a design “The Interior of a Fishing Shanty,” which took me all week, cost me something for models, and at which I did not make a princely fortune. Mr. [Charles] Parsons liked it, however, and that was some satisfaction.

It was published as “Interior of a Fishing Station” in the following June’s issue of Harper’s Monthly, and it illustrated Part II of his article, “A Peninsular Canaan,” born out of travels on Maryland’s Eastern Shore the previous summer.

November 3, 1906

On November 3, 1906, Basil King, author of “The Hanging of Mary Dyer,” wrote to Howard Pyle:

Permit me to thank you for the beautiful illustrations with which you have ennobled - the word is just - my little story of Mary Dyer, in the November issue of McClure’s. I cannot but feel that if I had only seen the illustrations first, I should have written a better tale. I have to thank you, too, and most sincerely, for the kind suggestions with regard to one or two details in the story, that were incorrect. It was the more important that Mary Dyer should come out of the prison with her hands unbound - as you represented her - from the fact that in the scene on the scaffold, which is absolutely historical, she is spoken of as though, at first, her hands were free. Until you pointed it out, I had not noticed the inconsistency in my own narrative. Again let me offer you my most genuine thanks.

The painting King refers to, "At her appearing the multitude was hushed, awed by that air she wore" (5 x 7.4" in the magazine, 21.5 x 30.5" in the flesh), has also gone by the more prosaic “Mary Dyer Being Led to The Scaffold.” According to my notes, George L. Dyer purchased it and its two companion paintings (both about 16 x 24") directly from Pyle. On October 31, 1921, the two companion paintings were stolen from a private residence in East Orange, New Jersey, and never recovered. This one, though, now belongs to the Newport Historical Society in Rhode Island.

Howard Pyle’s Mother Died 125 Years Ago Today

Margaret Churchman Painter Pyle, aged 57, died on November 2, 1885, at her home at 502 West 11th Street in Wilmington, Delaware. “Cancer of Stomach” was the cause of death, according to Dr. James A. Draper. This tribute appeared in Every Evening the next day:

The death of Mrs. Margaret C. Pyle will cause sincere and wide-spread grief and a social vacancy that cannot be filled. Years ago Mrs. Pyle became well-known for her literary ability and her able and helpful criticisms of Wilmington’s best amateur actors, and her parlors have year after year furnished the most enjoyable amateur dramatic entertainments in Wilmington. The culture of many of the best educated people in this city has been largely influenced by her work at the Friends’ Social Lyceum and similar literary gatherings, and by her most casual conversation. The loss sustained by the removal from our midst of an individuality like that of Mrs. Pyle cannot be estimated; it can only be felt.

Cats, Witches, Pyle, and Holmes

And now here are two pen and inks that Howard Pyle made for “The Broomstick Train,” contained in the little leather volume, The One Hoss Shay, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company in 1891.

The drawing above is titled “They called the cats” and the one below is “They came - at their master’s call.” Pyle’s letters show that he made these two in June or July 1891.

“I think these are about as successful pen and inks as I have ever done,” he said of his work on the book in a letter of July 2. And of the pictures for “The Broomstick Train” in particular, he wrote on July 7, “there may be very little to show in the way of result, but I really put a considerable deal of care and thought upon them.... I am myself inclined to think that they are, perhaps, in some respects, the best of the three lots.” The two other “lots” being the title poem and “How the Old Horse Won the Bet.” All exhibit the almost nervous, yet confident handling we see here - a far cry from his much “slower” ink drawings of the 1880s.

Witchcraft

Yet another witch by Howard Pyle - and surely one of my all-time favorites.

This was the headpiece for “Witchcraft” by Edmund Clarence Stedman in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, for December 1884. Editor Henry Mills Alden’s letters to Stedman allow us to date the creation of this picture with some accuracy: on May 20, 1884, Alden wrote, “The subject you propose is an especially attractive one. I think Pyle would do both pictures well; but as you will have the poems ready so soon, we will leave that matter to be determined afterward.” And on August 28, Alden wrote, “Last week the illustrations came in - i.e. the engravings. I send you proofs of these...” So Pyle must have painted this in June or July 1884 (well, plus or minus a few days into May and August). It was engraved by Thomas H. Heard.

The original has yet to surface - that is, if it exists at all: in the early morning of December 8, 1902, a fire swept through the home of William Charles Le Gendre in Mount Kisco, New York - and one of Pyle’s three black and white oil “Witchcraft” paintings was destroyed. Perhaps Pyle himself had given the work to Le Gendre, who was a friend and one of the illustrator’s roommates at 1267 Broadway in 1877-78.

The glowing eyes of the witch and the bleak landscape call to mind a scene from F. W. Murnau’s Faust (starting at about three minutes in - it still makes my hair stand on end).

Initial J (with witch enclosed)

And here’s another witch by Howard Pyle from the same story as my previous post. It’s more roughly executed than, say, this initial “T” from The Wonder Clock, but it’s still quite charming.

A Howard Pyle Witch

In looking for something Halloween-y to post, it occurred to me how often Howard Pyle depicted witches - or at least old hags from Massachusetts with pointy black hats. So here’s one that hasn’t gotten a lot of play as it only appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for February 1892. It served as a headpiece for Mary E. Wilkins’ spooky story, “The Little Maid at the Door.”

Howard Pyle and Boutet de Monvel

Jeff Menges just blogged about Boutet de Monvel and somehow - yet not unexpectedly - it conjured up thoughts of Howard Pyle. Stylistically, the two artists seem to have had little in common, but they shared a love of bold composition and strong design. It’s interesting to compare how Pyle and Boutet de Monvel depicted the same scene from the story of Joan of Arc.

Pyle was certainly aware of the Frenchman and they may even have become personally acquainted when the latter visited America in connection with an exhibition of his pictures at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, held March 24 to April 6, 1899. In a letter to their mutual friend, Robert Underwood Johnson, Pyle wrote:

I hope I may have the pleasure of meeting M. Boutet de Monvel when he is in Philadelphia, but I doubt if it be much to his pleasure, as it would, in a certain sense, be to my embarrassment - for I do not speak his language. The impossibility of inter-communication of thoughts and ideas is always distressing to me.

Did Pyle overcome his anxieties and meet his fellow artist? I don’t yet know.

September 23, 1896

“Did thou tell them how I taught thee?” by Howard Pyle (1896)

On September 23, 1896, Howard Pyle wrote to Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell regarding the illustrations for the novel, Hugh Wynne:

…I wish most heartily now that I had not undertaken to illustrate it. I quite agree with you that a story, especially one that is so dramatically told, is very much better without illustrations than with them - that is unless these illustrations be made to fill out the text rather than to make a picture of some scene described in it.

I do not feel that my ability in picture-making lies in illustrating stories. In such work I am hampered and confined by the text, and my talent (such as it is) can have no room in which to play. It has always seemed to me to be better to choose for an illustration some point, if possible, not mentioned directly in the text but very descriptive of the text.

For example, in the first instance I was compelled to choose the return of the little boy from school welcomed by his mother. This, while perfectly charming in your description of it, was not a subject one could very well depict. You gave the idea of cool, dark interiors and wide spaces. In making the drawing I had to limit myself to the open door and a small vista outside; for in making a drawing one must make it with what one sees with the eyes and not with what one sees with the mind and thought, as you make in the text. If the story which I was illustrating had been mine, I would rather have chosen some impersonal subject to be called, perhaps, “Mother and Son,” in which the mother, with her arm around the little boy, is walking down the dark room with such surroundings as you depict in the text.

There is no such scene mentioned in your story, but I think it would illustrate the feeling you intend to convey, and if correctly drawn, would carry forward the thought of the reader with some definiteness of purpose.…

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

The Sun Also Rises in Chincoteague

In researching my posts on Howard Pyle’s Chincoteague trip, I found two letters from a Baltimore Sun correspondent, who visited the island around the same time. The first was printed on Thursday, August 17, 1876 (two days after Pyle’s first Chincoteague article appeared in the Wilmington Daily Commercial), and the second on Monday, August 28, 1876. As would be expected, they cover similar ground, and they also confirm - and call into question - some of Pyle’s observations. The correspondent, who signed his pieces “N.E.F.,” turns out to have been Norval Emmet Foard (1837-1906), who was associated with The Sun for almost 40 years. Here is a little from his point of view:

The Sun, Baltimore, Thursday Morning. August 17, 1876.

CHINCOTEAGUE ISLAND, VA.

An Island World and its Inhabitants - Epicurean Living - Beach Ponies and their History - Interesting Sketches, &c.

[Correspondence of the Baltimore Sun.]

OCEAN CITY, WORCESTER COUNTY, MD. August 16, 1876.

Having heard so much about Chincoteague since coming to this part of “the Shore,” I concluded that Chincoteague, which is an island on the east coast of Accomac, Va., must be a sort of pony paradise. Eastern Shoremen had told me that Chincoteague was a world within itself, having the best things to eat that the air, the earth and the sea afforded. I found that the Delawarians made up excursions to the Mecca from Georgetown and even from Wilmington, and that several trains a week ran down to the island, and that the islanders were always getting up a pony penning, a pony sale, a camp-meeting or some other divertisement as an attraction to allure visitors. So I determined to go to Chincoteague....

Indeed, the Wilmington Daily Commercial had noted that Chincoteague’s annual sheep-shearing would be held June 7, and (in the July 24 issue) that excursion trains would run to the island during the camp-meeting (held, evidently, August 5-17) and also that “special” excursion trains would run on the day of the penning (which day was not specified, but it was supposed to occur during the camp-meeting). Clearly, the place was not a well-kept secret. Now back to Foard:

I chose Sunday for my trip knowing that although the camp-meeting on the island had been closed there would be Sunday services in the pine grove where the camp had been held. Hiring a country conveyance, with no back to the seats, I drove from Ocean City to Berlin, where at 9.30 A.M. an excursion train from Delaware, comprising four coaches, and freighted with peninsula belles and beaux [or about 150 travelers in all], came along, and by eleven o’clock had reached the jumping-off place, which is Franklin, on the Boundary line of Worcester and Accomac....

By “Sunday” does Foard mean August 6? Or August 13? I think August 6 as he goes on to say, “Last week there was a penning of some thirty [ponies].” Also, Foard’s dateline was Wednesday, August 16; Pyle’s was Saturday, August 12, and Pyle referred to “the occasional penning of the ponies, or driving them into corral, one of which took place during our visit last week.” I assume they both meant the same “last week” and attended the same penning. Since Foard arrived midday Sunday and, as Pyle noted, “it was quite early in the morning when the penning came off,” I’m inclined to think it occurred between Monday, August 7, and Friday, August 11.

Furthermore, Foard’s Sun letter of August 28, shows that although Pyle reported on a pony-penning that summer, it was not the annual pony-penning as has been suggested or stated by Pyle himself and by some biographers - several of whom (starting, I think, with Charles D. Abbott in 1925) have also said that Pyle’s visit was in Spring 1876. Foard, again:

The Chincoteague annual pony-penning, occurring this year on the 23d and 24th of August, attracted many excursionists from Delaware and some from Baltimore. The recent completion of the line of railway to Franklin, and the employment of steam in the navigation of Chincoteague sound, are progressive steps in opening up this hitherto but little frequented section, which possesses attractions for sportsmen as well as for business enterprise. Chincoteague is now within easy reach of Baltimore and Philadelphia in a day, and large excursion trains from Wilmington, Georgetown, or Harrington, Del., to Ocean City or Chincoteague Island have been of frequent occurrence nearly every week this summer.

Maybe the precise date of Pyle’s particular penning will be found in one record or another, someday. Adding to the confusion is Foard’s statement that “the camp-meeting on the island had been closed,” whereas the Commercial stated it would be held August 5-17. Pyle, meanwhile, didn’t mention the camp-meeting in the Commercial, but in Scribner’s Monthly:

Sharing the interest with the pony penning is an occasional camp-meeting in the woods, occurring once in a year or so. In among the great pines of Chincoteague is a noble place for such a gathering, when at night their huge trunks are illuminated by the light of the “pine chunk” bonfires, in the gleam of which the distant trees flash forth for a moment and then vanish into obscurity again, - and when the solemn measured chant of the Methodist hymns is heard and the congregation sways with the mighty religious passion that stirs them, while over all hang lurid wreathings of resinous smoke.

Pyle certainly sounds like an eyewitness here, so maybe Foard was mistaken, or maybe Pyle was describing Foard’s “Sunday services in the pine grove.” (Or, yes, there’s always the chance that Pyle made more than one visit, which would render moot much of all this hand-wringing.)

Foard’s second Sun letter does, at least, corroborate the presence of Otto Lugger (1844-1901), who later became State Entomologist of Minnesota. Pyle called him “Otto Leugger” in the Commercial, but he is an unnamed “learned naturalist from the Baltimore Academy of Natural Science” and “the professor” in Scribner’s Monthly. Foard says:

In addition to sportsmen several widely known scientific men have during the past few weeks made Chincoteague the scene of their investigations, with valuable and interesting results. Mr. Otto Lugger, curator of the Maryland Academy of Sciences, has spent two weeks pursuing scientific research under the direction of Prof. P. E. Uhler, president of the academy, who also spent five or six days in the interesting field offered to the enthusiastic naturalist. Capt. Caulk, a Chincateager, who is given to kindred pursuits, says Mr. Lugger is the quickest bug catcher he ever saw, and that he has an eye as sharp as a microscope.

Other parallels can be found, but, over all, Foard, the well-seasoned journalist, is more generous - or just objective - and less prone to comic exaggeration and condescension than Pyle. He introduces Kendall Jester, for example, but doesn’t touch on his drinking. And here is his take on a typical Chincoteague home:

As their houses were all open to enjoy the cool air from the water the interiors were fairly exposed. In a ramble that took in thirty or forty small dwellings there were none which did not reveal a family party comprising parents and three or four children, with here and there a single aged relative seated at the little family board, the mother busily ministering to the wants of the family. Each dwelling had but one large room on the ground floor, an attic overhead, a back building for cooking, a little meat-house, pantry or safe in the yard put up on one or two posts, and in many cases an arbor or small shade tree, under which the table was spread. All the exteriors of the dwellings and fences were neatly whitewashed. The front room, in which the large high post family bed, protected with mosquito netting, stood the conspicuous article of furniture, was invariably a model of cleanliness. The bed clothing was of snowy whiteness, and the housewife’s hands appeared in many bright specimens of patchwork, while the husband’s taste was apparent in colored prints of marine subjects or trophies from the bay associated with his calling.

But Foard’s style is also much less evocative: compare the dramatic sweep of Pyle’s prose with this brief, bland description of (presumably) the same event:

Last week there was a penning of some thirty head belonging to the estate of a deceased testator for sale. The herd were driven by mounted riders down the beach into the enclosure, where the squealing, kicking, biting and tumult was immense. In order to catch and reduce or break them, the lasso had to be used, and a fight, in which several men engaged with each pony, was the invariable result. Breaking is always a difficult matter, but when finally accomplished and the mastery secured the animal is always characterized by docility afterwards....

And, according to Foard, the annual penning held later that month was even more dull:

The pony-penning was not so interesting as former occurrences of the kind are represented to have been. The ponies, several hundred of which were driven up from the beach, showed the wildness of any unrestrained stock, though there were but few that appeared desirable, and these were held at very high rates. In catching the animals after they were driven to the corral, Kendall Jester, who is a large and powerful man, employed a slip-noose, which he put over the heads of the wild ponies, and a great deal of kicking, neighing and dust, but nothing exciting in the whole business.

Well, we know what Chincoteague did for Howard Pyle, but Norval Foard seems to have been relatively uninspired by the place. Still, a more thorough side-by-side comparison of their respective reports would be useful to chart out, one of these days.

“In the Reading-Room” at Sotheby’s

“In the Reading-Room” by Howard Pyle will be auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York City on Wednesday, September 29, 2010. It comes from the massive James S. Copley Library, which has been sold in parts over the past few months. The subject must have appealed to Copley, a newspaper man, who may have acquired it in the 1960s from Helen L. Card, successor to E. Walter Latendorf, who had it in 1950.

This 20 x 14" black and white oil on canvasboard was one of 26 illustrations Pyle made (probably in late 1889) for John Austin Stevens’s “Old New York Taverns” in Harper’s Monthly for May 1890. He was paid $800.00 for the lot: $100.00 each for four full-page oil paintings and $400.00 for 22 pen-and-ink drawings. Another one of the oils - “Game of Bowls” - sold at Christie’s in 2008 for $25,000 (including Buyer’s Premium).

As do a number of Pyle’s pictures from the late 1880s, this one features a sort of microcephalic gentleman with large feet. Not sure why Pyle fell into this trend, but I’m on the case.

You can zoom in and really study Pyle’s confident brushwork here.