100 Years of Illustration

Howard Pyle: King Arthur and His Knights

[The Story of King Arthur and his Knights, written and illustrated by Howard Pyle is copyright © 1903 by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York and first published in November 1903. Subsequent editions and reprints have been published by Scribner's as well as Dover Publications.]

Henry C. Pitz, in his excellent book, The Brandywine Tradition, Houghton Mifflin, 1969, has this to say of Pyle’s King Arthur:

". . . it was an opulent stirring volume which opened the gate to an imaginary empire of medieval legend. It did not reflect the merriment of the Robin Hood or the innocence of
The Wonder Clock, but it had much of the power, masculinity and impressiveness of Otto of the Silver Hand. Its text captured the medieval spirit, yet the book was readable. The pictures reflected the influence of Albrecht Dürer as it had been transformed by Howard Pyle. The story had been a success when serialized in the pages of St. Nicholas, and it was both an immediate and lasting success as a book. Today it occupies a permanent place on the shelf of children’s classics."

Click on the following images to enlarge.

Pitz also tells us that "Except for the King Arthur series, the pictures of his later years concerned themselves entirely with adult subject material [not to be confused with what adult subject material means today] and, as a consequence, they became more factual than imaginative."

The illustrations above and the following vignettes from the book illustrate and glorify feminine beauty and appear to me to be that Pyle was already well on his way to leaving the world of children's literature. Click on images to enlarge.

[A second color that did not appear in the original drawings has been added in these images for effect.]

Next: Howard Pyle's Sindbad.

Howard Pyle: The Travels of the Soul

Scanned from the original printing.

A portion of the illustration.

The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine published this colorplate for Pyle’s The Travels of the Soul in its December issue of 1902. Henry C. Pitz, a very significant book illustrator wrote about this piece in his splendid book, The Brandywine Tradition, " . . . . it was plain that the new [four-color printing] process had reached a triumphant level. [Pyle’s illustrations for The Travels of the Soul] are extraordinary examples of their kind for such an early date. They have an enamel-like richness of color that wraps the figures in the light and shadow of another world, to make the group one of Pyle’s happiest excursions into the pictorial imagination. Up to that time there had been nothing like it in American illustration."

Greetings of the Season. Have a Splendid New Year.

Next: Howard Pyle's King Arthur and His Knights

Howard Pyle: Spirituality

Howard Pyle grew up in a family of Wilmington, Delaware, Quakers who later embraced the Swedenborgian faith without total acceptance of all its principles. However, there is much to be seen in Pyle's work of angels and supernatural images. The following illustrations are offered as examples of his fascination with otherworldly subjects.

Click on the image below for an enlarged view of this heralding angel.

Click on any of the three images above for enlarged views.

I have no idea what this illustration is all about and include it because I find it to be so typical for the period. It also begs the question, why is the crescent moon so distracting, being as it is so close to the heroine's head? (Perhaps it was mentioned in the story it illustrates.) It also seems to cross the line into gallery painting, with Pyle having a foot in each camp.

Even in this illustration of an Edith Wharton poem, Pyle seems to morph his spiritual style with that of the Italian religious painters of the Renaissance. You know by now that I'm not an academic or art historian so I can only offer the opinions of an illustrator, and from that perspective I can assure you that it is a remarkable drawing for a magazine illustration of 1901. Click on either image to enlarge.

Next: a Holiday Interlude.

Howard Pyle: Line and added color, Harper's, 1900

The original illustrations for this story which appeared in the December 1900 issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine were painted in oil on mahogany panels. This darkened them too much for proper reproduction. Pyle was then obliged to redo all of them. I believe he first drew in black ink as he normally did his black and two-color work and then added watercolor on top of the ink when it had dried.

The title of the work is The Pilgrimage of Truth by Erik Bøgh and translated from the original Danish by none other than Jacob Riis, who became famous as a writer and social activist, whose book How the Other Half Lives was first published by Scribner’s in 1890.

Five of the illustrations follow. Click on each image to enlarge.

The story is about a mystical creature, Truth, who descends from heaven and meets a king who proclaims truth to be that which he decrees. Then she confronts priests who only say they know what truth is so they can influence their followers; later a politician who carefully uses only that much of truth than can be useful to him.

At last she meets a fool who says she is his wife and a fool as well to protect her from those who wish to silence her by killing her.

Next: Howard Pyle's Spirituality

Howard Pyle: An Introduction

Academics usually refer to Howard Pyle as one of the greatest illustrators of his time. I disagree. Howard Pyle was the greatest and the best, The Man. Not to take anything away from his famous peers: Edwin A. Abbey, A.B. Frost and Frederick Remington, but Pyle was not content to continue copying himself in the same old way as they did for the most part, and he was at least as prodigious, turning out two illustrations a week, or 3,300 published illustrations during a 35-year career. Included among these were almost 200 stories that he wrote as well as illustrated.

He was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1853 in comfortable surroundings. His father was a leather manufacturer, his mother encouraged his interest in the arts and literature from an early age by reading to him and acquainting him with fine books.

Later, he studied art in Philadelphia and began teaching at the young age of 19. Four years later Scribner’s Monthly Magazine published his first illustrated poem in their July 1876 issue. [I have tried to find this in the Cornell on-line library but have been unsuccessful. Perhaps it in the June issue, which is not listed in their collection.]

He taught at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry (now Drexel University), Philadelphia, at his own school in Wilmington, Delaware and his summer school in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, in the Delaware River Gap. Many of Pyle's "students" were mostly practicing illustrators who came for critiques rather than for lessons as such.

Howard Pyle’s first full-color illustration appeared in 1897. I do not have a copy of this but I offer this instead, a fascinating composition of a woman playing a mandolin, one of several that accompanied A Puppet of Fate, an Extravaganza for the Christmas Season, which he wrote as well as illustrated. It appeared in Harper's Monthly for December 1899. Click on image to enlarge.

One of his most famous and most recognizable illustrations appears next.

The Buccaneer Was a Picturesque Fellow, 1905 from The Fate of a Treasure Town by Howard Pyle. Harper's Monthly, December 1905. It is painted in oil on canvas, 30 x 19 in. (77.5 x 49.5 cm) and in the collection of the Delaware Museum. Click on image to enlarge.

Click on image to enlarge.

Here's Pyle at his best. Look at those feet. Conventional wisdom has it that hands are the most difficult to draw, but I say it's feet. These feet are comfortable in their sandals and the character is grounded, to use a contemporary expression.

This is the title page where that illustration, among others, appeared. The black-and-white illustrations by Pyle are equally as competently done. Click on image below to enlarge.

Next: Howard Pyle's masterful pen work