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

“Why am I so blue?”

“All eyes were turned to Abraham Davenport...” by Howard Pyle

It’s always interesting - interesting to me, at least - to see great minds succumb to rounds of anxiety and self-doubt. On July 17, 1883, Howard Pyle wrote to his wife, Anne, who was down at her family’s cottage in Rehoboth, Delaware with their 13-month-old son, Sellers:

I sit here this evening a right up and down blue man. Why am I so blue? That I can’t tell thee; thee knows how I get such spells upon me; one of them is upon me now. I have had a day of enforced - I might almost say - idleness through the failure of Harpers to send the Higginson MS. that they must forward. Beside this, my drawing for Butler (the Philadelphia publisher) has not turned out what I could have desired. It is too good to do over again and yet is almost too bad to send away. I want to get it out of the house for I hate the sight of it when I come into the studio. I don’t know whether it is the hot weather or whether it is thy being away that upsets me, or whether I am going backward in my work, but certainly it seems to me that I do not draw so well now as I did three months ago. I really am very much inclined to write to Mr. [Charles] Parsons [head of Harper & Brothers’ art department] and ask him to send me away somewhere on a trip so that I can get away from the jog-trot drudgery of manufacturing pictures for two or three weeks. If I have a change, perhaps I can tackle my work again with more vim and go when I come back to it again.

Pyle may well have been in a sort of post-partum depression at this point: he had recently finished writing and illustrating his Gesamtkunstwerk, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood - which would come out that fall - and he seems to have been casting about for something equally absorbing. He had just begun writing verses which would later be collected in Pepper & Salt and was doing - or trying to do - his usual bread-and-butter work.

The “Higginson MS.” was Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s manuscript for either “The Dawning of Independence” or “The Birth of a Nation” or “Our Country’s Cradle” - articles which Pyle ultimately illustrated for Harper’s Monthly.

And his “drawing for Butler” is, perhaps, the illustration shown here for Monroe's New Fifth Reader (Philadelphia: E. H. Butler & Co., 1884), which somehow missed inclusion in the 1921 bibliography of Pyle’s works (I’m not yet entirely sure if this is the one Pyle meant, though: I need to keep hunting).

Pyle’s Franklin Street studio, meanwhile, was in the process of being built, hence his statement, “I want to get it out of the house,” since between 1881 and 1883 his workspace was located in his - actually, his mother-in-law’s - home at 207 Washington Street in Wilmington.

Still blue, Pyle wrote to Anne the following day: “Bad luck today. No MS. from Harpers.… Rubbed off from my picture that which I did yesterday, and think it looks better. I shall send it away tomorrow without touching it any more - I hope.”

Pyle’s Post-Publication Changes, Part 2

Howard Pyle was not above reworking a picture after publication. “The Burial of Braddock” is one example: after it appeared in Harper’s Monthly - and after Paul Leicester Ford pointed out an error in it - Pyle turned a fancy, but historically innaccurate coffin into a crude box made of scrap wood. He did this right before shipping it to its new home at the Boston Public Library where it would, in his words, “go upon record.”

Another post-publication change can be seen in his 1889 work, "My hatred of him seemed suddenly to have taken to itself wings," for Harold Frederic’s novel In the Valley. Here’s how it looked in Scribner's Magazine for July 1890, engraved by Henry W. Peckwell:

"My hatred of him seemed suddenly to have taken to itself wings" (magazine version)

Now compare it to the halftone plate that was used in the book edition of the novel. (Granted, this is really just to show how the original picture differs from engraver Peckwell’s interpretation.)

"My hatred of him seemed suddenly to have taken to itself wings" (book version)

Fast-forward to 1892: Frank Nelson Doubleday - then a rising star at Charles Scribner’s Sons, but who hadn’t yet struck out on his own - was collecting material for a high-end, oversized “book” in portfolio form called American Illustrators. In early April, Doubleday wrote to Pyle about the project and asked him to choose one of his illustrations to be featured among the 15 finely-printed plates. Without hesitation, Pyle picked "My hatred of him seemed suddenly to have taken to itself wings" since it was “perhaps, my best work for Scribners in black and white.” Doubleday then tracked the original to Germany (I’m not sure why it was there) and had it shipped to Pyle.

But on July 16, 1892, just after receiving the picture, Pyle asked Doubleday, “if you would be willing for me to alter the drawing a little. I find, looking at it with new eyes, that the canoe is somewhat out of proportion and just a little out of drawing and I should like to make it as perfect as possible.” Doubleday acquiesced and Pyle had at it. The result can be seen here, in the photogravure plate as published in American Illustrators that October:

“The Wounded Enemy” (American Illustrators version)

Not only did Pyle reconstruct the ends of the canoe, he fiddled with the tall trees in front of the moon, softened the waterline, and toned down the reflections in the water. All of it to good, almost Dewing-esque effect. The title, too, was changed to the much less wordy “The Wounded Enemy.”

I don’t know if the original painting ever made its way back to Germany, but Scribner’s loaned it to the Trans-Mississippi and International Exhibition in Omaha, Nebraska in 1898, and in May 1913 they sold it for $150 (double, incidentally, what they had paid Pyle for it 24 or 25 years earlier) to collector William Bradhurst Osgood Field (1870-1949), and now it belongs to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. And exactly two years ago today, Joyce K. Schiller’s short essay on the picture was posted here.

Perhaps Not Without Snap and Go

"On sped the light chestnut, with the little officer bending almost to the saddle-bow"

On this date 120 years ago - July 15, 1891 - Howard Pyle shipped the picture seen here to F. B. Schell, head of the art department at Harper & Brothers. “I think myself that it is perhaps not without snap and go,” Pyle remarked in a letter of the same day.

He had only started painting it some two weeks earlier. “I suppose I had better first of all, do the Battle of Monmouth illustration for the Weekly, had I not?” he asked Schell on June 30. “And will you kindly tell me if Mr. Davis especially prefers it in ink or whether he would be as well satisfied if I made it in wash? I think I would prefer doing it in wash although I will do the best I can in any medium that you and Mr. Davis may prefer.”

“Mr. Davis” was Richard Harding Davis, writer, bon vivant, and editor of Harper’s Weekly - who Pyle admired for “putting lots of ‘blood’ and ‘grit’ into the paper”. Evidently, Davis and Schell preferred a pen and ink illustration (which would be much less expensive to reproduce than a wood-engraving), but, as Pyle explained on July 15, “I found upon consideration and trial that the subject did not admit of it and so had to use the other medium.” The “other medium” in this case was black and white oil, which often fell under Pyle’s broad term “wash”.

Pyle also apologized for having “so long delayed doing the work” since Davis had handed him the manuscript on or about June 16. But the details had taken a few weeks to hammer out and in the meantime Pyle’s studio was being altered and he had had to vacate it temporarily. “Then, beside,” he added, “I got interested in the subject and spent more time upon it than, perhaps, I should have done.”

The picture illustrated “The Two Cornets of Monmouth” by A. E. Watrous in Harper's Weekly for September 12, 1891.

A good reproduction of the original painting can be seen in Alice A. Carter’s book on Pyle students Violet Oakley, Elizabeth Shippen Green, and Jessie Willcox Smith, titled The Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love.

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
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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.

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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.

“It was great to see him painting”

“In the Valley of the Shadows” by Howard Pyle (1902)

Mr Pyle likes very much to have us watch him work and the other day we went up to his house & watched him work on a picture (one of four) for the Xmas Century. It was great and seeing him produce such a thing was a treat & helped to strengthen my confidence in him. He is undoubtedly the greatest in his line and oh such a fine man.

So wrote Allen Tupper True - then a probationary student of Howard Pyle at Chadd’s Ford* - to his mother back home in Colorado on July 11, 1902. He was referring to Pyle’s illustrations for “The Travels of the Soul” which came out in The Century Magazine for December 1902. But which one did True see? Well, on November 24, 1902, he wrote his father and said:

How do you like his work in this (Xmas) Century? It was great to see him painting on that third one ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Shadows’ [sic]...

And where was Pyle “painting on that third one”? At what was then known as Lafayette Hall, the house where Pyle stayed when teaching at “The Ford” from 1898 to 1903 - just across the road from the studios at Turner’s Mill. Here’s what the place looks like these days:

This photo, by the way, comes from some kind of real estate listing that states: “The Brandywine School of Art was birthed in this home and the property was immortalized by Andrew Weyth in his painting ‘Painters Folly’". Surely they mean Andrew Wythe! Just kidding. Seriously, though, I don’t know where to begin....

* Although it’s now commonly or even officially called “Chadds Ford” - sans apostrophe - Pyle always referred to the village as “Chadd’s Ford”, so I’ve been following his precedent for the sake of consistency.

William Henry Jackson and Howard Pyle

William Henry Jackson, circa 1873

In his autobiography, Time Exposure, the celebrated photographer and artist William Henry Jackson (1843-1942) said:

After our marriage [on October 8, 1873, in Cincinnati] Emilie and I went to New York for a few days.... Following our brief whirl in the metropolis we went on to Baltimore for another few days, where I had the pleasure of meeting many of Emilie's relatives and friends. Then we proceeded to Washington and a winter of work for me.

“Emilie” was Emilie Painter (1841-1918), and since the extended Painter family was a pretty tight-knit group in those days, I take it for granted that “many of Emilie's relatives” included her aunt Margaret Churchman (Painter) Pyle (1828-1885) - and Margaret’s then 20-year-old son, Howard.

Yes, that Howard. But damned if Jackson couldn’t mention his first-cousin-in-law by name! Especially since their connection was more than tangential: in a 1906 letter to Jackson, Pyle wrote, “I often think of you and how that it was you who gave me my first knowledge of how to do practical work. You have acted an important part in establishing me in a very happy life.”

Strong words, yet Pyle didn’t acknowledge his debt to Jackson anywhere else I’ve looked, and - so far, at least - Pyle’s biographers have been silent on the topic. The same goes for Jackson’s biographers. So, after reading Pyle’s intriguing comment and realizing his genealogical connection to Jackson - but otherwise making no real headway in putting the two men together - I tracked down one of Jackson’s great-granddaughters. In a 1995 letter to me she said:

I thought I would write and tell you the story of how Howard Pyle asked his Uncle [sic] - my great-grandfather - if it would be wise for him (Howard Pyle) to take a course in life that would lead to art. He asked that of my great-grandfather because he was older and although my great-grandfather did not take up painting and illustration so much until he was in his 90s still he was an excellent illustrator and famous for his photographs.

My great-grandfather, William Henry Jackson, sent him a reply in the affirmative. He did not see why Howard would not do well in this line of work. My Father told me this story many times...

That’s pretty vague, as were some follow-ups with her. Recently, however, I noticed this news item from the Detroit Free Press of November 13, 1911:

FAMOUS ARTIST WHO DIED ABROAD WAS RELATIVE OF DETROITERS

Howard Pyle, the American illustrator whose death occurred in Florence, Italy, last Thursday, was one of the country’s greatest magazine artists, and it was largely due to the encouragement given him as a young man by a Detroiter, W. H. Jackson, 55 Alger avenue, that Pyle decided to embark upon an artistic career, which later brought him fame and large financial returns.

Mrs. Jackson, who was a daughter of the late Dr. Painter, of Baltimore, Md., was first cousin to the dead artist, who was a son of her father’s sister. In 1873, Mrs. Jackson’s husband was connected with a well known government geological survey and his duties brought him to Wilmington, Delaware, the home of Pyle, on many occasions. Pyle at that time was 20 years old, and was seriously contemplating an artistic career.

“One day he brought a drawing to me and asked me what I thought of it,” said Mr. Jackson, who himself is an artist of ability, “I saw that young Pyle had great possibilities, and told him to continue his studies. I advised him to send the drawing to the Harpers in New York. He did so, but the drawing was not accepted. I continued to encourage him, however, and later his talent found for him a regular position on the Harpers’ staff....”

Still, Pyle stated that Jackson “gave” him “knowledge” - not mere “encouragement” - which would imply that Jackson had actually taught Pyle something. (Although it’s an obvious choice, I doubt Pyle meant “photography” - though he did take photos and use them in his work later on.) And as for the confounding term “practical work”, in a 1903 interview, Pyle tried to explain:

The hardest thing for a student to do after leaving an art school, is to adapt the knowledge there gained to practical use - to do creative work, for the work at an art school is imitative. That is why so many go into portrait painting. When I left the art school [c.1872] I discovered, like many others, that I could not easily train myself to creative work, which was the only practical way of earning a livelihood in art. Nor was there anything like the present field. Not discouraged, but being offered a position by my father in his leather business in Wilmington I availed myself of it and during my spare time created illustrations, stimulated my imagination and worked assiduously on drawings I never submitted.

He goes on to mention his Chincoteague article and that “on its publication I felt my art was of some practical use”. So while “practical work” has a dry, kind of technical ring, Pyle connoted “practical” with “creative”, and other uses or variants of the term in his (and his students’) writings indicate that it had more to do with illustration, or, to put it broadly, with making “useful” pictures that a publisher would pay for and “that shall interest the great world beyond [the artist’s] narrow ken” - i.e. fellow artists stuck in their insular studio-worlds, who know only art, not Nature, and who are wowed by artificial “tricks of technical facility”, etc.. (I’ll append below some other examples of what “practical” meant in Pylean vernacular which may help clarify things - or not!)

So maybe Jackson critiqued Pyle’s pictures, suggesting “practical” ways to make them more appealing to publishers and the general public, and more easily reproduced by the as-yet crude methods employed by printers. Or maybe his role was more like Pyle’s to his own students - and that it was not so much about technical instruction (which Pyle had already received, anyway), but about “encouraging” him to open up to and connect with the pictorial possibilities all around him. As Pyle described his course in “Practical Illustration” in 1895, “I can tell little or nothing as to how to do the work technically. That which I try to teach relates more to the qualities of imagination, of observation and of realization.” Or, as he put it more poetically a few years later, he tried “to show the student how to throw his mind and soul into the beauties of nature that surround him; how to understand and to sense and to sympathize with human passion”. I gather it was some kind of hybrid.

At any rate, the two had plenty of time to get to know each other. From about 1872 to 1876, Pyle was working for his father in Wilmington. Jackson, meanwhile, as photographer for the Hayden Survey, spent only his summer months out west, but was based in Washington from November 1873 to July 1874 and from October 1874 to July 1875. He was in Wilmington itself on October 17, 1874: the Wilmington Daily Tribune noted that he had “paid a short visit to this city on Saturday, returning to Washington on the midnight train, in the course of which he communicated many interesting particulars of the adventurous survey from which his party is the first to return.” In the fall of 1875 Jackson was east again, working throughout the winter on the Survey’s dioramas and displays to be shown at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, which opened in May 1876. And he was on duty at the Centennial during its run and returned to Washington when it closed that fall - by which time Pyle had embarked on his career in New York.

But when and where and how frequently and for how long young Pyle met and talked with Jackson is an open question. I once dreamt of finding evidence that Pyle had tagged along on one of Jackson’s westward journeys, or that Jackson had hired Pyle to help him construct the Centennial dioramas, but after rooting through various papers and archives, I came up short. And so we’re left with murky anecdotes and rumors of lost conversations. But maybe some new, hard data will come to light, soon.


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Some Notes on “Practical Work”

The very name of Pyle’s first class at the Drexel Institute in 1894 was “A Course in Practical Illustration in Black and White” in which his lectures would be “followed by systematic lessons in Compositon and Practical Illustration, including Technique, Drawing from the Costumed Model, the Elaboration of Groups, treatment of Historical and other subjects with reference to their use of Illustrations.” Indeed, at the very first lecture, the very first thing Bertha Corson Day recorded Pyle as saying was, “Accuracy of drawing must be learned in schools - freedom in practical work.”

“I think my lectures are useful, but I think they only give in theory that which I want here to render practical to all. There are in Europe classes similar to this that I suggest, but none, I think, that devote the attention of the students to accomplish such really practical results as those at which I aim.” (Pyle to Dr. James MacAlister, April 7, 1896)

“Without meaning to criticise Mr Hammitt’s methods, I do not think they are of a sort to advance you in any real or practical knowledge of illustrative art.” (Pyle to Stanley Arthurs, September 11, 1896)

“...being an illustrator, and dealing with a more practical side of art, I stand, as it were, with only one foot planted in the Israel of academic art, the other leg being implanted in the Philistia of the outside world.” (from “A Small School of Art” by Howard Pyle, 1897)

“In this Class [in Illustration] I choose some special composition, trying to make it as practical as possible, submitting it to some illustrated magazine or newspaper, obtaining for it an order and then setting my students to paint this composition into a picture. The best one of these pictures I find sells with never-failing success; and so the student learns not only how to render nature in full color, but also what are the points that make a picture practical and useful. ...whenever I see a composition that strikes me as practical I explain why it is practical and advise my student to submit it to this or that paper.... I find that even so far as I have gone that our students are the best, and that the Academic students from elsewhere have an enormous mass to unlearn before they can begin to learn real and practical methods of work.” (Pyle to Eric Pape, May 26, 1898)

“My first object shall be to teach them to paint the draped and costumed model so that it shall possess the essentials of a practical picture.... My experience is that within a year of such teaching the pupil will be sufficiently grounded in a practical knowledge of painting to be able to embark upon illustrative work.” (Pyle to Edward Penfield, March 17, 1900)

“From the standpoint of a practical worker, it would seem to be a very plain statement of fact, that, if a cobbler does not sell his shoes, it is because they do not fit the feet of other men, and it would seem an equally natural inference to suppose that the very general failure to sell American pictures is because they do not fit the ideals of American men and women.” (from “The Present Aspect of American Art from the Point of View of an Illustrator” by Howard Pyle - a paper read before the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston, April 25, 1902)

“Not long ago we said good bye to one of the boys [Francis Newton] who is going to New York to start in on practical work.” (Allen Tupper True to his sister, June 27, 1902)

“He said he was very sorry that I did not come earlier for my work was very practical and looked promising...” (N. C. Wyeth to his mother, October 27, 1902)

Pyle “congratulated me upon my summer's work and told me that mine was the strongest - most practical and on the whole the best of all.” (N. C. Wyeth to his mother, October 19, 1903)

“...that which art students most need is the cultivation of their imagination and its direction into practical and useful channels of creation...” (Pyle to W. M. R. French, April 13, 1905)

“Cleverness seems to be substituted for exactitude, and the result is very unsatisfactory so far as any real and practical results are concerned. It is very discouraging to one who holds in view a real, material, and vital advancement in the practical uses of art to meet so many young artists, who, having passed from the schools, seek in vain for opportunities whereby they may earn a modest living...” (Pyle to James Hulme Canfield, April 17, 1905)

“It has been unfortunate that the fees charged for attendance at the League should have been so large as to have deterred many artists in practical lines of work from coming to me for help and advice.” (Pyle to Hugo Ballin, May 8, 1905)

“...the education given by the academies to the young artists who come to me for instruction has to be unlearned before I can impart the facts that are necessary to make their art of practical use in the world...” (Pyle to W. M. R. French, June 22, 1905)

“I am trying to push my work thro to a finish and get into practical work.” (Edwin Roscoe Shrader to Thomas Wood Stevens, February 11, 1906)

Ox, Ox, Darley and Pyle

The great illustrator Felix Octavius Carr Darley (1821-1888) lived and worked in Delaware at the same time that Howard Pyle was coming of age and establishing a career in the same field. In fact, in the 1860s, Pyle and Darley both occupied houses on the Philadelphia Pike: the Pyle family’s “Evergreen(s)”, just north of Wilmington, sat within five miles of Darley’s “Wren’s Nest” in Claymont.

I have yet to find much else connecting them, however, apart from Pyle’s childhood fondness for “Darley’s outline drawings to Washington Irving’s stories” and some other scraps.

But here’s something: take a look at Pyle’s “Bringing the powder to Bunker Hill” engraved by John Tinkey for “The Gunpowder for Bunker Hill” by Ballard Smith (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, July 1886).

“Bringing the powder to Bunker Hill” by Howard Pyle (1886)

And now compare it to “Margaret annoyed by her Brother” engraved by Konrad Huber from Compositions in Outline by Felix O. C. Darley from Judd’s Margaret (New York: Redfield, 1856).

“Margaret annoyed by her Brother” by F. O. C. Darley (1856)

Call it an act of homage or appropriation or plagiarism, but, subtle differences aside, it’s clear that Pyle based his illustration on Darley’s. After all, it was much easier than rustling up a pair of oxen to draw from - though their proportions might have improved had Pyle observed them in person.

Stamford’s Soprano

In the early 1890s, when Howard Pyle was very much under the literary spell of his friend W. D. Howells, he wrote a handful of “realist” stories set in contemporary America. “Stamford’s Soprano” was one. It came out in Harper's Weekly for June 24, 1893, with the untitled illustration shown here. The original painting - I assume black and white oil on board - is still somewhere in the ether.

Interestingly, Howells wrote to Pyle: “Stamford’s Soprano is very neat and fine; but I like your psychical things best; not that I think you oughtn’t to do all the kinds you like; all you do pleases me.”

Skipping ahead to November 12, 2014...

Since posting this, the original painting has surfaced and is set to be sold by Heritage Auctions in New York on November 17, 2014. The oil on canvas laid on board measures 19 1/8 x 13 7/8 inches (48.6 x 35.2 cm) and is, of course, “a damned fine thing” (as Vincent Van Gogh might say).

“...no better criterion of fundamental excellence of work...”

“...to have a drawing accepted and published is a sure sign that the work is above the average. There is no better criterion of fundamental excellence of work than to have it accepted and paid for by the Art Department of a magazine; and...there are no end of so called painters who would give much to have their work so accepted.”

Howard Pyle to Bertha Corson Day, June 23, 1896

Imagination vs. Imitation

Howard Pyle’s “We started to run back to the raft for our lives” from “Sindbad on Burrator” by A. T. Quiller Couch in Scribner's Magazine for August 1902. See the original oil at the Delaware Art Museum.

“...I think you may easily see that in the making of a successful picture, the artist must compose and arrange his figures and effects altogether from his imagination, and that there is very little opportunity in the making of such a picture for him to copy exactly the position of a model placed before him in the lights and shadows which the studios afford. Nor is it likely that he can find any background to copy accurately and exactly into such an imaginative picture.

“For example: suppose an artist were called upon to paint a picture of a man running away from his enemies along the shores of a sea; with a gray sky overhead, and a strong wind blowing over the landscape. You see, he could not pose a model in the required position, for not only could no model hold such a position as that of a man running, with a center of gravity projected far beyond the point of impact; but even if the model were suspended in the air in such a position, yet he would not convey the idea of running. Apart from this it would be very difficult to find exactly the seascape to fit the picture, and exactly the landscape. For all this, the man must draw, not upon the facts of nature, but upon his imagination.

“If I have expressed myself at all clearly, you will see that what a man needs to paint an imaginative picture of such a sort, is not the power of imitation, but the knowledge to draw a figure from imagination.…”

Howard Pyle to William Merchant Richardson French (Director of the Art Institute of Chicago), June 22, 1905

“The Doll Has Goitre” and Other Criticisms of Howard Pyle

Figure 1. “Her whisper was so soft he only guessed the words“ from "The Stairway of Honor" by Maud Stepney Rawson in Harper's Monthly Magazine for January 1904

One might think that Howard Pyle was universally lauded during his lifetime. But he had his critics. John K. Hoyt was one, and his stinging - yet amusing - long letter to The New York Times was printed on October 22, 1904. I've reprinted it in full, below, and - in case you don’t have scattered issues of Harper’s Monthly Magazine for 1904 at your elbow - I’ve inserted the illustrations to which Hoyt refers.


Mr. Pyle’s Illustrations

New York Times Book Review:

I wonder if the great periodicals of the day have art censors on their staffs. This thought occurs on seeing so much poor work in many of their illustrations. Take Harper's Monthly Magazine, for example. For some time it has been publishing illustrations in color by Mr. Howard Pyle. Mr. Pyle’s reputation stands high, and deservedly so. He can do good work, and he should keep his contributions up to the standard for excellence; but some of his drawings are distinctly bad. Not only that, but they are irrelevant to the story he attempts to illustrate. For instance, take the short story in the January number entitled "The Stairway of Honor." The hero, an artist, is a gentleman, and endowed with a keen sense of honor, while the heroine is a lady of high degree; in short a Duchess, and is very beautiful. Now turn to the frontispiece [Figure 1] - and behold! a man and woman with the faces of peasants, while that of the woman is weak and ugly, the very reverse of the woman described in the story. Both are deformed. Compare the man’s short arm and shriveled hand with his abnormal breadth of shoulder. Look at the woman's arms - both too short - and her misshapen body and her general air of awkwardness. The color in this picture is good, the drawing bad.

Figure 2. “He found Mélite alone” from “The Story of Adhelmar” by James Branch Cabell in Harper's Monthly Magazine for April 1904

In the April number the place of honor - the frontispiece [Figure 2] - is again assigned to Mr. Pyle. Here we have a wooden image sitting, garbed in the habiliments of a woman, with a heavy mat of jute, in lieu of hair, falling from her head to her waist. The figure is devoid of any lines indicative of feminine grace; it might be the figure of a boy - a wooden boy. The arms in those sleeves are not made of flesh and bones and muscle, but of good solid oak. The expression of the face betokens intense, sullen stupidity. A knight clad in armor stands in the doorway, leaning against the jamb for support, evidently bereft of strength - as well he may be - at the ugliness of the thing.

Figure 3. “He sang for her as they sat in the gardens” from “The Story of Adhelmar” by James Branch Cabell in Harper's Monthly Magazine for April 1904

Another illustration in this number, facing Page 706 [Figure 3], represents a woman with a faded, washed-out face; a silly, simpering face; and whose right side has been developed at the expense of the left. And then, while gazing, one is stricken with deep compassion, as he perceives that this poor creature has curvature of the spine, and he wonders how, under the circumstances, she can even simper. In this figure also there are no lines to indicate the sex. These two compositions are enough to drive the luckless author of “The Story of Adhelmar” frantic. And if he has survived the sight of them, he is doubtless now going about in quest of the artist and thirsting for his gore.

When it comes to art let, us be aesthetic or nothing. Let us change the titles of these two compositions and, after the manner of Whistler, call the first "A Nightmare in Blue," and the other "A Simper in White."

Figure 4. “Catherine de Vaucelles, in her garden” from “In Necessity’s Mortar” by James Branch Cabell in Harper's Monthly Magazine for October 1904

Turn to the frontispiece in the October number [Figure 4]. Here we have the picture of a Japanese doll, and - was ever such a thing heard of? - the doll has goitre. Not as yet a fully developed case; but it’s there, and is quite pronounced. The face is a blank wall; but there - dolls’ faces generally are devoid of expression. Some of the material left over from constructing the gown has been utilised in building a mouth. Was the moon an afterthought? It would seem so, for it is not night. Apple blossoms don't look like that by moonlight; neither does a red dress. At any rate, putting the moon there was a lucky hit - we might almost say an inspiration - for it draws the eye away from the doll-faced woman.

Figure 5. "Villon - The singer Fate fashioned to her liking" from “In Necessity’s Mortar” by James Branch Cabell in Harper's Monthly Magazine for October 1904

Figure 6. "The King himself hauled me out of gaol" from “In Necessity’s Mortar” by James Branch Cabell in Harper's Monthly Magazine for October 1904

Now turn to the pictures facing Pages 706 [Figure 5] and 708 [Figure 6] in this number. What a difference! Here we have good work, work that any artist might well be proud of. No uncertain touches here, no feeble lines; but good, strong drawing, and the colors laid on with the brush of a master. Mr. Pyle's backgrounds are almost always rich in color, harmonious, and effective.

I wonder why his men are so well drawn, while his women generally are not. Evidently he does not draw women from the model. Turn again to the illustration facing Page 706 in the April number [Figure 5]; compare the drawing in the figure of the man with that in the figure of the woman. Was there ever such incongruity? That of the man shows that it was drawn by an artist of the twentieth century who understands his work, while that of the woman might have been done at the time in which the story is laid, in the fourteenth century, or, rather, in justice to the artists of that time, let us say, during the paleolithic age.

Figure 7. "The drawing of the sword" from “The Sword of Ahab” by James Edmund Dunning in Harper's Monthly Magazine for August 1904

I said, I wonder why his men are drawn so well. They are not always. Turn, for instance, to the picture facing Page 335 in the August number [Figure 7]. The drawing in the figure of the man is bad. The lines are feeble, uncertain. His right shoulder is dislocated, caused doubtless - and it serves him right - by his efforts to draw the sword in that awkward and unheard-of fashion. The writer of the story fails to mention this accident; neither does he account for the presence in the picture of what is evidently an effigy from some modern wayside shrine in Italy. This only goes to show that an artist should exercise the utmost care in selecting an author to write up his pictures.

I do not claim that all women are beautiful, or that all of them have perfect figures; and if an artist chooses to portray them as ugly and deformed, he is clearly within his rights; but I maintain that when an artist is assigned to illustrating a story, he should place himself en rapport, if possible, with the author; should try to enter into his feelings, see with his eyes, depict the characters as they are described. And above all things, if the heroine is beautiful, let him make her beautiful - if he can.

JOHN K. HOYT.
Candler, North Carolina


Me (Ian Schoenherr) again:

Mr. Hoyt makes some good points: Pyle’s women, with a few exceptions, truly are the “weaker sex” - idealized, anemic, and bland. And, as the years went on, while Pyle’s pictures grew more vibrant in color, sometimes his figures lacked good construction and his compositions were oversimplified.

For the record, “the luckless author,” James Branch Cabell, thought Pyle’s illustrations for “The Story of Adhelmar“ were “magnificent.” But I never much liked “He found Mélite alone” [Figure 2] and “He sang for her as they sat in the gardens” [Figure 3] - or the third illustration, not shown. Too, the figures in "The drawing of the sword" from “The Sword of Ahab” leave something to be desired - although the setting, costumes, and color are pretty interesting.

I do like “Her whisper was so soft he only guessed the words“ [Figure 1] for its weird lighting, color, and atmosphere. The “faces of peasants” don’t bother me, but then again I’m descended from such “ugly” people.

Who knows if Pyle ever took note of Hoyt’s letter. He wrote later about “the futility of following such memoranda” and said, “Where they intend to praise they always miss the point, and where they intend to dispraise they leave, even though you know the dispraise does not amount to anything, a feeling of unpleasantness.”

Life Lessons from Howard Pyle

From “The Divinity of Labor,” a commencement address delivered by Howard Pyle to the graduates of Delaware College on June 16, 1897:

When you have chosen your profession and have entered fairly into the work of your life, that which is first necessary to achieve success is application.

By application is not meant mere dumb and stubborn laboriousness of duty; by application is meant the perfect conjunction or application of your mind to the subject in hand. If you are a farmer, do not pause at the end of the furrough to speculate upon the destiny of mankind; if you are a student, do not, whilst your eyes are marching across the page, allow your brain to occupy itself with other things; if you are an experimenter or an inventor, do not pause in the midst of your labors to formulate some new experiment or some other invention aside from that upon which you are at work; if you are an author, or an artist, do not permit your mind to ramble through the shady depths and the breezy stretches whilst your canvas or your paper lies empty before you. Bend every faculty of your mind on the work which lies beneath your hand. Concentration is a habit - it is not a gift, and I do assure you as a man who has known many men and who has observed many men at their work - I do assure you that just in the degree that a man concentrates his mind upon the work that lies immediately before him, in exactly that degree does he achieve success in the labor of his life.

As necessary, however, as is the concentration of the mind, it is not more necessary to success than it is to develop the opportunities that lie immediately at hand.

There are few temptations greater than the temptation that possesses a man to gaze into some impossible to-morrow, beholding in it an opportunity that does not exist to-day.

The opportunities that lie immediately at hand appear to be very small and very petty; and those that are remote appear to be very great and very pregnant of possibilities. Alas! how many men are there who, gazing into that seductive future, stumble over the things of the present and so fall prostrate in the dust!

He who succeeds, is he who seizes the opportunity that lies within his grasp and developes that opportunity to its uttermost. No one can ever achieve a great success unless he performs well the small things of life. To achieve success, everything, however insignificant, should be done to the fulness of your powers.

Master Pyle Goes to Washington

The United States Treasury Department at Washington, from a photograph by Alexander Gardner (1866)

“You aught to see the treasury bilding it’s steps are the queerest things I ever saw there is not any thing to hold them up yet hundreds of people walk on them ever day...

“Dr* says thers is more 3700 clearks and not more than 3 or 4 to each room The building takes up a hole squair much longer than any of ours...”

Howard Pyle, 13, to his father, William Pyle, June 16, 1866

* Dr. William Elder (1806-1885), physician, lecturer, political economist, biographer of Elisha Kent Kane, etc., etc., and longtime friend of the Pyle family.

To the Villa Torricella, June 14, 1911

Villa Torricella, Summer 1911 (Eleanor and Phoebe Pyle in the distance)

One hundred years ago today - June 14, 1911 - Howard Pyle and his family took up a three months’ residence at the Villa Torricella in San Domenico, just north of Florence. He later described the entrance to the property - which his son Howard photographed - in a letter to Mrs. Charles Copeland:

You approach this little villa up a rising lane from the road. The road itself is framed on either side by high stone walls, over which the verdure peeps, and it is so narrow that it would be impossible for two teams to pass one another. An iron gate shuts us from this road, and as the gates are opened you see before you the stony rise of a path, and overhead an arbor of vines and flowers. When we were here in the spring it was full of wistaria, and the air was loaded with their fragrance. Now there are few, if any, flowers, but only the leaves and the vines twined overhead.

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.

Sahibs, Sikhs, Pathans, Boers, Kipling...and Pyle?

Howard Pyle’s “Then appeared suddenly, a little beyond the light of the lamp, the spirit of Kurban Sahib” illustrated Rudyard Kipling’s short story, “A Sahib’s War,” in Collier’s Weekly for December 7, 1901.

The setting is South Africa during the Second Boer War (which was then in progress): “a tall young man deprived of understanding” is about to be hanged from a tree by two turbaned soldiers: Umr Singh, a Sikh, in the center, and Sikander Khan, a Pathan, on the right. But their efforts are thwarted by the ghost of a beloved British cavalry officer, Captain Corbyn (“Kurban Sahib”), recently killed in an ambush, who drifts toward them, saying, “No. It is a Sahib’s War.” A Boer woman is cowering on the ground with upraised “paroxysmal hands” (Singh and Khan sport them, too - common Pylean appendages).

The original for this has yet to turn up, so while I’m confident Pyle painted it in oil, I don’t know if it’s black and white, part color, or full color, or how large it is. The 9 x 10" halftone plate was retouched by an engraver, but it’s a pretty awful reproduction. Even so, its otherworldly weirdness and strength come through.

Lurid Pyle

This doesn’t look 113 years old, but it’s from Howard Pyle’s “A True History of the Devil at New Hope” in Harper’s Weekly for December 18, 1897. It served as a headpiece for the chapter titled “How the Devil was cast out of the Meeting-House” and the reproduction measures 6 x 3.3". A wonderful thing: flat, bright, bold, and creepy.

“The Robin’s Vesper”

The June 7, 1879, issue of Harper’s Weekly featured this full-page (12 x 8.9") illustrated poem titled “The Robin’s Vesper” by Howard Pyle. According to his younger sister, Katharine, this was one of the first things Pyle did after relocating from New York to Wilmington.

For the longest time I was under the impression that Pyle had left New York toward the end of 1879, but Katharine recalled that her brother’s “A Milkmaid’s Song” - published in Harper’s Weekly for July 19, 1879 - was also done shortly after his return to his hometown. Granted, Katharine’s not the most reliable witness, but fortunately we have at least two newspaper items that back her up: on May 12, 1879, the New York Herald lamented, “Howard Pyle has gone to Wilmington, Del., we regret to hear, to stay.” And the Art Interchange for May 28, 1879, noted, “Howard Pyle has left New York for good and is now living in Wilmington, Del.”

In the late 1870s through the early ’80s, Pyle made a couple of genre pictures such as this, akin to and almost contemporaneous with some of Winslow Homer’s studies, like Autumn and Peach Blossoms.

Pyle did the hand-lettering himself, too, and in case you find yourself tripping over his long s’s, here’s a transcription:

The Robin’s Vesper
by Howard Pyle

When shadows brood upon the hill,
And daylight draweth to a close;
When frogs pipe by the lowland rill,
Within the valley’s dim repose;
Then the small bird seeks her nest,
Swinging on the blossoming spray;
Only Robin doth not rest,
Singing to the dying day.
Sweet Robin!
Merry Robin!
So I’d have my Soul to be,
Singing clear
Thro’ the near
Shadow of Eternity.

Howard Pyle vs. N. C. Wyeth

Behold, two great versions - two great visions - of the same scene from Kidnapped:

“I saw him pass his sword through the mate’s body” by Howard Pyle (1895)

“I saw him pass his sword through the mate’s body” by Howard Pyle, painted in black and white oil, about 11 x 16" on canvas board for The Novels and Tales of Robert Louis Stevenson: Kidnapped (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895). The original is at the Delaware Art Museum. The reproduction in the book (from which the above was scanned) is only 3 x 4.3" and the sized paper has rippled and yellowed over time.

“The Siege of the Round-House” by N. C. Wyeth (1913)

“The Siege of the Round-House” by N. C. Wyeth, painted in full-color oil on canvas, about 32 x 40" for Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913). The Brandywine River Museum has the original which is considerably less yellow than this plate (5 1/4 x 6 5/8") from an early edition of the book.

The more I look at Pyle’s paintings the more I feel that there is a certain “quietness” (I wouldn’t say “coolness”) in even his most action-packed scenes. They uncannily capture those slow-motion, hushed moments of highest tension. As I’ve said before (somewhere around here), one of the things I love about Pyle is that his best pictures - and his best writings - activate my other senses as I look or read: I feel the sun’s hot glare; I smell the grass or the smoke; I hear the distant birds or lapping waves. It’s subtle, yet it’s a big part of what gives his work its resonance and power. And when I look at this picture I hear the thin, almost imperceptible blade piercing the mate’s clothing as it emerges from his back.

Pyle once said something to the effect of, “If you hear a man say, ‘I will kill you!’ in wild passionate tones you will not believe that he means it - but if he should say it quietly and deliberately with the passion kept behind you will know that life is endangered.”

Of course, N. C. Wyeth rarely kept the passion behind. In this as in so many of his pictures (especially his earlier ones) his barbaric yawp is loud and clear - not to mention the cacophony of clattering swords, shouts, and stamping feet. His scene is more overtly melodramatic and theatrical than Pyle’s: it’s even illuminated as if by footlights. But while Wyeth’s actors are hammier, his colors brighter, and his composition simpler, somehow he pulls it off - as he so often did. His over-the-top approach was as effective as it was different from his teacher’s “quiet and deliberate” path.

“I think myself they are among the best”

“Blackbeard's last fight” by Howard Pyle (1894)

Finally, some pirates.

On June 4, 1894, Howard Pyle sent the last two illustrations for Jack Ballister’s Fortunes to William Fayal Clarke, his editor at St. Nicholas Magazine. His pirate novel for children was then running in installments and these two pictures wouldn’t appear until the issues of July and September 1895. Both were painted in black and white oil on academy board (probably made by Devoe & Co.) about 10 x 15 or 16".

Pyle seems to have begun these after May 16, 1894, the day he sent in the three preceding pictures - or maybe even after the 17th, when he and Clarke discussed the final four subjects over lunch in New York - or maybe - and perhaps more likely - after May 25, when he replied to a letter from Clarke, who had a few concerns about them.

“I hope you will like these drawings,” Pyle wrote to Clarke on June 4. “I think myself they are among the best, especially the fight, in which I have studiously thrown Blackbeard somewhat in the background.”

And that’s the curious thing about the painting: we see comparatively little of Blackbeard, whose braided-bearded face, with a dagger clutched between his teeth, is dead center, yet partially obscured by the cuff of the dark-jacketed Lieutenant Robert Maynard. Here is Pyle’s long description of the chaotic scene:

Lieutenant Maynard, as he called out the order, ran forward through the smoke, snatching one of his pistols out of his pocket and the cutlass out of its sheath as he did so. Behind him, the men were coming, swarming up from below. There was a sudden stunning report of a pistol, and then another and another, almost together. There was a groan and the fall of a heavy body, and then a figure came jumping over the rail, with two or three more directly following. The lieutenant was in the midst of the gunpowder smoke, when suddenly Blackbeard was before him. The pirate captain had stripped himself naked to the waist. His shaggy black hair was falling over his eyes, and he looked like a demon fresh from the pit, with his frantic face. Almost with the blindness of instinct, the lieutenant thrust out his pistol, firing it as he did so. The pirate staggered back: He was down - no; he was up again. He had a pistol in each hand; but there was a stream of blood running down his naked ribs. Suddenly, the mouth of a pistol was pointing straight at the lieutenant's head. He ducked instinctively, striking upward with his cutlass as he did so. There was a stunning, deafening report almost in his ear. He struck again blindly with his cutlass. He saw the flash of a sword and flung up his guard almost instinctively, meeting the crash of the descending blade. Somebody shot from behind him, and at the same moment he saw someone else strike the pirate. Blackbeard staggered again, and this time there was a great gash upon his neck. Then one of Maynard's own men tumbled headlong upon him. He fell with the man, but almost instantly he had scrambled to his feet again, and as he did so he saw that the pirate sloop had drifted a little away from them, and that their grappling-iron had evidently parted. His hand was smarting as though struck with the lash of a whip. He looked around him; the pirate captain was nowhere to be seen - yes, there he was, lying by the rail. He raised himself upon his elbow, and the lieutenant saw that he was trying to point a pistol at him, with an arm that wavered and swayed blindly, the pistol nearly falling from his fingers. Suddenly, his other elbow gave way, and he fell down upon his face. He tried to raise himself - he fell down again. There was a report and a cloud of smoke, and when it cleared away Blackbeard had staggered up again. He was a terrible figure - his head nodding down upon his breast. Somebody shot again, and then the swaying figure toppled and fell. It lay still for a moment - then rolled over - then lay still again.

I should note that the above passage comes from the book, not the magazine, and differs a fair amount since Pyle extensively revised the text somewhat over a year later. The picture, too, was retitled, “The Combatants cut and slashed with savage Fury,” for the book version. Go and see the luminous original at the Delaware Art Museum.

“‘Then I will come,’ said he” by Howard Pyle (1894)

The second picture shows Jack Ballister and Miss Eleanor Parker “standing in the full moonlight, which will make an effective contrast to the illustration preceding it, having, as it will, a background setting of the night and the starry sky.” Or so Pyle described it in his letter of May 25, 1894. He went on:

This picture will not necessarily be especially dark, though of course it will not be as brilliant as the full sunlight. Nevertheless, I should recommend it as a fitting subject. It accents the peaceful conclusion of a rather active story, especially as it will directly follow, both in the magazine and the book form, the fight between Blackbeard and the King’s men.

It seems to me that it would hardly be in keeping with the story to culminate the illustrations with action instead of repose. However, of course I will make whatever illustrations you think fitting.

But Clarke conceded, and Pyle painted with breakneck speed. His Wilmington neighbor, Caroline Tatnall Bush - called “Carrie” - who later married Christopher L. Ward, posed for Eleanor, who, in turn, provided the name for Pyle’s second daughter, born February 10 that same year.

More on John Henderson Betts

Last year I posted something about John Henderson Betts, who studied with Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institute and at Chadd’s Ford, but who met an untimely and gruesome end shortly before his 25th birthday. Since then, a few of his paintings have come to light...

Betts conveniently dated this one November 9 (or 4), 1897, and he most likely made it in Pyle’s Life Class Studying from the Draped and Costumed Model (a.k.a. “Draped Model Class” or “Class in Draped Model” and so on) since it contains no “setting” per se. As Pyle said in the Drexel course catalogue:

In this class, departing essentially from the ordinary work of academic schools in studying from the living figure, the model is costumed and posed in some suggestive action, and the student is instructed to draw the figure that it may be introduced into a picture.

Or, as he put it another (yet, perhaps still convoluted) way:

The purpose here is to instruct the student in the necessary technical methods to be used in representing the draped human figure. The processes required to properly draw the draped figure are so different from those demanded in the rendition of other kinds of academic work that it has been found necessary to require proficiency in this before advancing the student to the final branch of instruction.

Although Pyle did not pick Betts’ study for the second annual School of Illustration show in the spring of 1898, another student, Cornelia Greenough, exhibited “The Cavalier, 1650,” which may have come from the same pose. (Betts' “Colonial Figure, 1740” was shown, however, as well as his “Peace and War,” “Study of a Head - Emperor,” and “The Highwayman.”)

And now here’s something representative of “the final branch of instruction” - i.e. the Illustration Class:

 

Although this one is not titled, I would call it “The Priest and the Piper.” Why? Because two other Pyle students, Sarah S. Stilwell and Bertha Corson Day, exhibited pictures of that name in the May 1899 student show at Drexel and Pyle (who I’m sure wrote the text of the catalogue) said:

The subject was painted as class work with the purpose of having one of the pictures used in Harper’s Weekly [sic] Hallowe’-en number. Of all the class work, the best two examples were chosen. The above two were submitted to Harper’s Weekly, and the drawing by Miss Stilwell was selected as being the most available for publication.

Now, compare Betts’ with Stilwell’s picture, which was published in Harper's Bazar (not Harper's Weekly) for November 5, 1898. There it’s called “A Vision on All-Hallows Eve” and it illustrates a playlet by Pyle himself, titled “The Priest and the Piper: A Halloween Fantasy”...

“A Vision on All-Hallows Eve” by Sarah S. Stilwell (1898)

And while we’re on the topic, the Brandywine River Museum has a painting by Caroline Louise Gussmann, which may have been born out of the same knock-kneed piper pose. (In fact, there may well be a score of similar images out there - and the same goes for Betts’ cavalier picture.)

“Tipsy Piper” by Caroline Louise Gussmann

This next and last one is dated November 1898, which may have been after Betts left Drexel. But the Pyle influence is still very much in evidence - and since one of Betts’ compositions was exhibited in the May 1899 show, perhaps he studied with Pyle for a while after the summer session of 1898. This looks less like a class piece than a bona fide illustration, though I have yet to identify if, when, or where it was published.

And in case you’re inclined to learn more about these or see several other works by Betts, please look here.

Would that I could snag them myself!