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1853
- 1911
Howard Pyle has long been considered ‘The Father of American Illustration’ as much for his prolific and superb work as a writer and illustrator as for his commitment to teaching. In the 1890s, Pyle was well established as an illustrator and turned his mind to teaching others. He founded the first school in the nation for illustration at Drexel Institute (1894-1900) in Philadelphia. In the same year he published 99 illustrations bring him substantial fees, yet he never accepted money for any of his teaching. Many of the greatest illustrators attended his classes at Drexel, and later at the Howard Pyle School of Art in Wilmington (1900-1905), Delaware, and in the summers at Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
Pyle’s school in Wilmington made that city the center of illustration in the country and the Delaware Museum of Art was founded to house his art works. Pyle had about two hundred students during his teaching career of whom more than eighty were well known and successful, and two dozen who were very famous. The students and their students became known as ‘The Brandywine School’. Some of the best known included Stanley Arthurs, Clifford Ashley, William Aylward, Arthur Becher, Anna Whelan Betts, Ethel Franklin Betts, Harvey Dunn, Anton Otto Fischer, Philip R. Goodwin, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Gayle Hoskins, Oliver Kemp, W.H.D. Koerner, Violet Oakley, Maxfield Parrish, Ernest Peixotto, Frank Schoonover, Jessie Willcox Smith, Henry J. Soulen, Sarah Stilwell Weber, C. Leslie Thrasher, and N.C. Wyeth. A most extraordinary and little known fact was that Pyle’s classes were about fifty percent female students-an unheard of proportion in those days.
Pyle was born into a Quaker family from Delaware and he lived his whole life there except for two years at the Art Students League early in his career and one year at its end in Italy, where he died in 1911. His family was not unhappy when he expressed an interest in studying art although such a thought was not on a Quaker agenda. His first art teacher was Van der Weilen, but at the age of 23 he moved to New York to attend the Art Students League. He expected to gain an education as an artist, an easel painter for there was no specific education for illustrators. Like most of his students, Pyle went into illustration to earn a living at his craft. While in NYC studying, he was able to obtain small commissions illustrating for Century Magazine. Other commissions flowed from his initial projects including; Collier’s Weekly, Everybody’s Magazine, Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Monthly, Cosmopolitan, The Ladies’ Home Journal, McClure’s Magazine, Scribner’s, Wide Awake, and St. Nicholas magazines. In 1879, Pyle returned to Delaware and produced a number of books, which he both wrote and illustrated, including Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates, The Story of King Arthur and his Knights, Men of Iron, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, and for other publishers; Riverside Press, The Bibliophile Society, Century, Little Brown and Company, Scribner’s, and Houghton Mifflin, Co.
Howard Pyle was a master of all forms of media. He excelled in pen and ink, watercolors, oils, and pencil and charcoal, equally well. From his experiences as an art student, he realized that there was no training, which taught a young artist the difference between a cover illustration and an interior image. The application of masthead lettering to an image took certain finesse and design ability, which was more than an easel artist’s training, and so on. That there was a great need |
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Photo: The
Society of Illustrators
arising to train illustrators with the advent of better publishing technologies. When teaching, he tried to instill certain standards of behavior amongst his students to imbue them with his own precepts. He had the goal to train a generation, which could visually define this nation for itself through illustration.
Pyle recommended that his pupils look to their own country and their own lives for inspiration. He asked the students to train themselves hard, spiritually and artistically, to experience the environments they wished to replicate and to use authentic props in their paintings to enhance images. Howard Pyle’s influence is the most enduring influence on all illustrators, bar none. His teaching methods were as bold as his own paintings. His images of our national story have become commonplace in the nation’s history books and in the artistic molding of what it means to be an ‘American’. It was said that Pyle had the fine faculty of transporting himself into any period of history and with his masterful brush; he turned historic figures into flesh and blood. He captivated anyone who read his stories or viewed his images.
While his most familiar works remain the images of rakish pirates, tough cowboys and noble knights, populating children’s adventure novels of his day-they, remain the paradigms, the prototypes, the stereotypes, they will forever remain our models.
Howard Pyle was born in 1853, at the most propitious time for an illustrator of great genius. It was a time comparable to Michelangelo’s birth with its respective coincidence of the Renaissance and Medici rule of power. When Pyle was born, the American public was getting interested in knowledge, in establishing our own cultural icons, and our civilization had begun to flower. A young Quaker artist understood that the new magazines and progress in printing meant that a need for more images was looming ahead with the ability to satisfy the public’s thirst.
Pyle’s magical images came from a vibrant mind, which enhanced his notions with authenticity making fairy tales, and fictional personages come alive in the reader’s mind’s eyes. During his career, Howard Pyle produced illustrations for nearly 3,500 publications and about half of those images illustrated books and articles he authored - 200 magazine articles and 19 books.
His grandson Howard Pyle Brokaw wrote of Howard Pyle, “The variety of subject matter, the authenticity of costumes and settings, the evidence of erudition, the arresting compositions, the mastery of line, and the bold use of color were all means to the end of making his illustrations live for us. Clearly, the fundamental artistic value of a representational picture lies not in its literal meaning but in its expressive form. Nevertheless, the skillful rendering of that literal meaning is one of the organic means by which the picture's expressive form is carried to us.”
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