Howard Pyle

Illustrator, mural painter, and writer Howard Pyle was a dominant figure during America's so-called Golden Age of book and magazine illustration, from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries. A descendant of English Quaker immigrants, Pyle grew up in the idyllic setting of his family's home near Wilmington, Delaware, and was encouraged by his mother in his interest in stories and pictures. At the age of sixteen he began his only formal art training: three years of study in Philadelphia under a Belgian artist named Van der Weilen. While assisting his father in the leather business in Wilmington, Pyle wrote and illustrated stories which were accepted for publication by the important New York magazines Scribner's Monthly and St. Nicholas, a children's journal. Encouraged by this success, Pyle moved to New York in 1876 and enrolled in a figure sketching class at the Art Students League as he began to sell his drawings to St. Nicholas and to Harper and Brothers, America's largest publishing house. His illustrations continued to be in demand during the heyday of illustrated story publishing.

Pyle returned to Wilmington permanently in 1879 and married two years later. While continuing to work for Harper's, he followed his original interest in writing as well as illustrating children's books. His first, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire, appeared in 1883 and established Pyle as one of the nation's foremost children's book authors and illustrators. Pyle published many more full-length stories and collections for young readers, including fairy tales and historical epics set in the Middle Ages. Between 1903 and 1910, he published a four-volume retelling of the story of King Arthur and his court. After spending several summers at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, with his family and traveling to Jamaica, he produced a series of illustrated tales of pirate adventure.

In 1894, Pyle began teaching classes in illustration at Philadelphia's Drexel Institute. Four years later, he initiated summer classes at Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania, and then ran his own school in Wilmington until 1905. His talented students included many of America's most important illustrators of the day, notably Edwin Austin Abbey (1852–1911), Violet Oakley (1874–1961), Maxfield Parrish (1870–1966), Jessie Wilcox Smith (1863–1945), and Newell Convers Wyeth (1882–1945). By all accounts, Pyle was a gifted, even inspirational teacher.

In 1905, Pyle took up the practice of mural painting. His commissions included projects for the Minnesota State Capitol building and two courthouses in New Jersey. Five years later, in failing health, Pyle made his first trip to Europe to further study mural painting. After a year of travel in Italy, he died in Florence at the age of fifty-eight. Pyle is best remembered for his children's books, so popular that they have remained in print for more than a century.