Howard Pyle: Italy

"The Mermaid" by Howard Pyle, 1910

"Until now Howard Pyle had refrained from going to Europe because he was afraid that he might lose something of the American spirit, which he thought so necessary to his creative work. He made arrangements with his publishers that sufficient material for illustration should be sent to him from time to time. Then on November 22, 1910, he sailed from New York accompanied by his family and Miss Gertrude Brinckle, his secretary. 

Just at this time he began to be afflicted with exceedingly bad health. When one considers the vast number of things which he had accomplished between 1876 and 1910, one can only wonder how any human frame could bear up under such uninterrupted exertion. Literally thousands of illustrations, 19 books, many uncollected short stories, 14 mural paintings, not to mention a number of bookplates and several excellent easel paintings, all these were the productions of something less than 34 years, during which time he read voluminously, and devoted himself passionately to his family.

But in 1910 the strain began to tell. He was ill when he reached Italy, and at no time during his year of residence there did he regain the robust health which he had always enjoyed up to that time. No doubt it affected his reaction to Italy. In his correspondence he wrote:

'I do not think that Italy is what it's cracked up to be. There are buildings that are in a wonderful state of preservation, but the place itself seems dilapidated, run down and dirty. There are some exceptions to this. Among these is the Uffizi and Pitti collection of the work of the Old Masters.'

'You know, I did not think much of the old masters, seeing them in black and white, but in color they are so remarkable that I do not see how any human being painted as they did. You stand among them, and you feel that you are surrounded by a glow of soft, warm, ardent colors in which the yellows and the browns are the predominant tones and the wonderful blues and crimsons are the relieving notes. All the time I was there, I kept thinking of my pupils and wishing that they could see these pictures. It would be such a great and splendid lesson to them for all their future color work.'

After he had traveled around Italy, he came back to Florence, where he had a sharp, bilious attack, which left him in a much more serious condition than he had been before, and which hastened his death, which occurred a few days later, on November 9, 1911.

He had accomplished, however, his greatest mission in life: he had been instrumental, along with others of his early comrades, in raising the illustrative art in America to a level which had been hitherto unknown. He had by the consummate artistry of his own creative work, and by the energy of his teaching, helped to lift it from the tawdry commonplaceness in which he had found it in 1876 to the flowering beauty in which he left it in 1911."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Howard Pyle, A Chronicle" by Charles D. Abbott.)