Howard Pyle: Summer School at Chadd's Ford

"Untitled Vignette," picturing Howard Pyle painting
Fort Ticonderoga with Ethan Allan looking on

"In 1898, Howard Pyle established a summer class at Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania. He felt that to a limited number of pupils he could give during the summer months so intensive and so practical training that it would repay any sacrifice which he might have to make. The Drexel Institute agreed to give scholarships to a certain number of talented pupils. He on his side was to give instruction without receiving any salary. 

An old mill on the banks of the Brandywine was turned into a studio, and the meadows around were used for all sorts of outdoor sketching. Here on the site of the Battle of the Brandywine, he taught his young protégés, among other things, to draw the Revolutionary soldier. 

The keynote of the summer school was work. All day long he kept the young men and women at their easels, inspiring them with the enthusiasm which he always had at his command. Then, oftentimes in the evening, he and Mrs. Pyle would entertain them at the big country house in which they lived during the summers. Every now and then he would give them a day off, and they would all go on a picnic to Valley Forge or some other interesting place in the surrounding country. 

Toward the end of the first summer he wrote in a letter: 

"A week from tomorrow our summer school closes. I think we have produced some very good results, though I am not sure but the high achievement for which I was ambitious has been entirely attained. I dare say I expect too much of my students, but I think it is better to expect too much than too little. By the end of the summer we will have illustrated five books containing somewhat upwards of 50 drawings. We will have made about a dozen very excellent landscapes and have accomplished four studies of the draped figure, of which three examples each - twelve examples in all - may be exhibited this coming fall with credit to the students and to the Drexel Institute. 

In our efforts to build up at art school upon the useful and practical lines that have been laid down for it, nothing has so far advanced those endeavors as the work of this school during the past season. In two instances a doubtful student has been converted into an artist of very decided promise. And all the students of the class have shown more advance in two months of summer study than they have in a year of ordinary instruction.This, of course might have been largely due to the fact of the contact of the students with nature and of their free and wholesome life in the open air. Their labors were assiduous and unrelaxing, their recreation being taken only in the evenings. They prepared for work by eight in the morning, and they rarely concluded their labors until five or six in the afternoon. Apart from the great and abundant happiness they enjoyed, they were able also to earn considerable amounts of money from their art work."

To be continued

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