The Brandywine Tradition, and: Howard Pyle: Writer, Illustrator, Founder of the Brandywine School, and: Howard Pyle (review)

Howard Pyle was not only a talented artist and writer, but an influential teacher whose students, working in the "Brandywine Tradition," did much to form popular taste in book illustration in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Several useful books on Pyle and his school are currently available and should be of interest to students of children's literature.

In 1968 Henry C. Pitz described in The Brandywine Tradition the way in which Pyle's influence made the quiet , rural Brandywine Valley in northern Delaware and southeastern Pennsylvania into a "snug enclave" of artistic talent and achievement. The Brandywine Tradition offers an account of Pyle's career, together with a description of his influence on such artists as Frank Schoonover, Jessie Wilcox Smith, the Wyeths, and over a hundred others. At the core of the Pyle tradition Pitz saw a "concern for human values, . . . delight in the exercise of the pictorial imagination, the feeling that design should follow the behest of content and the conviction that the illustrator has a power over and a responsibility to his audience." The Brandywine Tradition is modestly illustrated in black-and-white and in color. Those Pyle illustrations which are reproduced are mostly the familiar ones, and are relatively few in number. This is unfortunate, since Pyle's own artistic development is the central concern of the book.

In 1975, however, Pitz published another rather more satisfying study—Howard Pyle: Writer, Illustrator, Founder of the Brandywine School. In this generously illustrated large-format book much of the essential material of The Brandywine Tradition is re-worked to good effect. Pitz's tendency to enthusiastic repetition has been somewhat disciplined, and his metaphors seem less frequently mixed. His attitude toward Pyle's work is as reverently uncritical as ever, but the abundantly detailed account of Pyle's technical development as an artist is quite interesting, and there are some fascinating glimpses of the New York publishing scene of the time. The quality of the many well-chosen color and black-and-white illustrations is excellent. The book has been handsomely produced. Examples of the work of many of the artists who influenced him are juxtaposed with Pyle's own work in the first chapter, and some early sketches suggest how soon Pyle came to his own sensitivity to form and his ability to express character with economy. There is an entire chapter devoted to Pyle's work for children. This and another which analyzes Pyle's art of the pen should be of particular interest to specialists in children's literature. An appendix includes a chronology of Pyle's life, a list of his students, and a bibliography of works about Pyle as well as a truly imposing bibliography of works he either wrote or illustrated.

In 1975 Bantam Books, together with Charles Scribner's Sons, published (under the Peacock Press imprint) a collection of forty-three color reproductions of Pyle paintings, most of which are in the permanent collection of the Delaware Art Museum. This book is the third in the Bantam "World of Realism" series, and includes a wide range of Pyle's work in illustration of folklore, fantasy, and romantic fiction, as well as a number of his meticulously researched historical studies. The very scope of this collection is a reminder of the unique artistic, social, and commercial context which produced the market for the artists of the Pyle tradition. Studies like those Pitz has done of the Brandywine School, and study collections like that at the Delaware Art Museum remind us that illustrative art tells us a great deal not only about an artist's taste and vision, but about the interests and expectations of his public. As Rowland Elzea...