Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered (review)

Released as a catalog by the Delaware Art Museum for the recent commemorative exhibit of Pyle’s work one hundred years after his death, this is an oversized, sumptuously illustrated collection of eleven documented essays (with biographical chronology) about Pyle’s career as an artist and painter. As editor Heather Coyle aptly puts it, the work provides “a variety of recent perspectives on Pyle, situating his images, writing, and instruction within the story of American art” (11–12). Although Pyle’s imagery receives more attention in this volume than does his prose, the essays nonetheless supplement and expand upon discussions in the special Pyle section of the summer 1983 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, further illuminating the tremendous impact of its subject’s work on children’s literature, illustration, and bookmaking in the US. Taken together, the two compilations give contemporary scholars in children’s literature and American studies an understanding of Pyle’s importance as: (1) an early adapter of folklore and legend; (2) an illustrator who trained many of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century US magazine and book illustrators within children’s literature; (3) a committed Swedenborgian who applied his faith’s perspectives to his creative work; and (4) a staunch supporter of an American ideal of patriotism.

Published one hundred years after Pyle’s first great classical adaptation The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood appeared in book format, the ChLA Quarterly section addressed Pyle’s most important contributions to American children’s literature. Former presidents of the ChLA, then young scholars, provided seminal pieces about unique perspectives of Swedenborgianism found in The Garden Behind the Moon (Perry Nodelman, “Pyle’s Sweet, Thin, Clear Tune”); the ideal of an American hero embedded in The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (John Cech, “Pyle’s Robin Hood”); and the stinging critique of war in Pyle’s medieval novel, Otto of the Silver Hand (Jon Stott, “The Purposiveness of Evil” and Malcolm Usrey, “A Milestone of Historical Fiction for Children”). Also found in the same issue are discussions of Pyle’s work as a poet, illustrator, and literary folklorist, a description of the Delaware Art Museum’s manuscript collection by then-curator Rowland Elzea, and an evaluation of his work as a visionary of American patriotism by American historian Robert Vitz. Still, pirates are missing, as is a serious discussion of Pyle’s multivolume rendition of the Arthurian legend. There is much to be gained by turning to what Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered reveals on these topics, as well as several other facets of Pyle’s career.

All of the essays in this new work highlight Pyle’s career as an important American artist and teacher, but several are particularly useful to scholars in children’s and young adult culture. Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack have written extensively on the Arthurian legend and Pyle’s work, but in “Howard Pyle and the Arthurian Legends” they adroitly pinpoint his expansions on the legends and show that he used the traditional tales in a “democratization” of the characters, asserting that “it is not the armor that makes the knight but rather his virtuous and dutiful action” (50). They have chosen some of the most dramatic and highly retold scenes in both text and illustration for their analysis, concluding that Pyle used the stories to suggest an earthly “paradisal garden” where men could live in peace (53). In addition, they point to Pyle students who continued the tradition of romanticized Arthurian illustrations for other American retellings.

Anne M. Loechle discusses Pyle’s imagery of pirates in “Gunpowder Smoke and Buried Dubloons,” while David M. Lubin expands on Pyle as the “inventor” of the pirate clothing and stances we find in American movies, from Douglas Fairbanks in the 1926 The Black Pirate to Johnny Depp in the twenty-first-century Pirates of the Caribbean. Loechle traces Pyle’s pirates back to earlier publications, including Charles Johnson’s illustrated A General History of the Robberies and Murders...