Book Excerpt

Order Nr. 75317 HOWARD PYLE: HIS LIFE -- HIS WORK. Paul Preston Davis
(Pyle, Howard).

HOWARD PYLE: HIS LIFE -- HIS WORK.

2 volumes.
New Castle and Wilmington: Oak Knoll Press and The Delaware Art Museum, 2004. 9 x 12 inches. hardcover, dust jacket. 906 pages. 2 volumes. At the dawn of the 20th century, Howard Pyle was America's most famous and influential illustrator. Through the illustrated pages of Harper's, Scribner's and Century magazines, the American public first became acquainted with the illustrator that they would come to love. Both by example and through his teaching, Pyle molded and..... READ MORE

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Foreword


THIS IS AN IMPORTANT AND VALUABLE book. It catalogues the achievements of a man who during the period known as illustration's golden age was recognized as the father of American illustration. Assembled with maximal emphasis on accuracy and complete- ness, the book presents for the first time a full record of Howard Pyle's creations-his writings and his illustrations.

Howard Pyle's productive period was a century ago, spanning the 35 years from 1876 to 1911. Born in Wilmington, Delaware in 1853 of English Quaker stock, he lived in that city all his adult life except two years in New York near the beginning of his career and the final year of his life, spent in Italy studying that country's Renaissance muralists. From an early age Pyle, encouraged by his mother) was fascinated by pictures and by writing. He later recounted a tale of himself as a child) taking pencil and paper in hand and sitting down by the garden wall to compose a poem-only to realize that he hadn't yet learned how to read or write.

As a youth in his teens he spent three years in Philadelphia taking technical lessons in drawing and anatomy. Then in New York in the late 1870’s he learned about his calling through association with other artists and with publishers. But even at that early stage in his development and in the midst of that practical environment he was discerning enough to recognize how essential to genuine accomplishment in the field of illustration was the stimulus and guidance provided by the imagination.

He returned to Wilmington in 1879, judging he had attained sufficient competence to pursue a fruitful career. Over that career, in addition to murals and the many pictures drawn or painted for his own satisfaction, Howard Pyle produced about 3300 published illustrations, a rate of about two a week. Half of those illustrated his own writings-19 books and nearly 200 articles and stories in magazines. At least half of those 19 books are still in print and being read today.

In technical virtuosity, in factual accuracy, in versatility, he was considered the foremost illustrator of his time. Those valuable skills, however, were but a means to an end; his goal was artistic creativity, and his achievement of that goal was broadly recognized.

In 1942, Professor Deane Keller of the Yale University School of Fine Arts had this to say about Pyle's illustrations: The indiscriminate, thoughtless remark, 'It's just an illustration' calls for correction if not censure. If the reference is to the majority of drawings and paintings in our magazines, books, funny papers, it holds water. There is altogether too much of this stuff which is utterly lacking in vital force and which merely panders to the taste of the great public for pretty girls. .. square-jawed heroes... and so forth. The compositions are thrown together without regard to pictorial selection and arrangement. In the hands of Pyle, illustration was as much a fine art as it was in the hands. .. of Giotto, who immortalized the great St. Francis at Florence and Assisi in a series of illustrations on the walls; or of Gozzoli, Leonardo, Rubens,