From the Archives

Howard Pyle–Wilmington Friends School’s Foremost Writer and Artist? By Terence Maguire WFS Archivist

Howard Pyle (1853-1911) was the most highly regarded illustrator of his time and arguably Delaware’s most successful writer. His parents, William Pyle and Margaret Painter, were both of Quaker heritage. They were married in and attended Wilmington Monthly Meeting at Fourth and West, the founding meeting of Friends School. Sometime in the late 1850s or early 1860s, little Howard was a pupil at that school. He did not attend for very long.

When I was a grammar school student, Howard Pyle was one of my favorite writers, and I read and re-read his four books retelling the tales of King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table. Some years after I came to WFS to teach, I was delighted to learn that Pyle had been a Friends School student; and a few years later I was disappointed to learn he was there only briefly. Eventually, as I came to know the nature of our school during the 18th C. and most of the 19th C., I was not surprised. The purpose of this school for its first century and more was to provide very basic education–reading, writing, and “ciphering” (arithmetic)–for the children of Quakers and for the poor of Wilmington. Friends School did not offer art or music until the 1890s, and its teaching of literature was probably quite rudimentary as well. The first art teacher, Clawson Hammitt, was hired in 1888. The School Committee debated for three years about whether to add music to the curriculum, and in 1892 decided, rather tentatively, to rent a piano. I imagined that young Howard, brimming with creativity and imagination, around 1860 was bored; perhaps he was, in the modern phrase, “counseled out.”

Further research shows a more complicated picture. To begin with, a very charismatic Quaker teacher, T. Clarkson Taylor, who was in charge of the boys’ division of Friends for five years, left in 1857 and his successors were apparently far less inspiring. Taylor began his own school, Taylor and Jackson Academy on Eighth Street. Taylor was a devout Quaker and strong abolitionist, and he imparted Quaker values to his students, but his school was not connected with the Meeting. Howard attended Taylor’s school, for at least his early adolescent years, before he left Wilmington to study art in Philadelphia and eventually New York City. As cited in Jill E. and Robert P. May’s recent biography*, Pyle’s classmate, Henry Conrad–later a Delaware Superior Court Judge and historian–“remarked that Pyle ‘did not excel’ in most subjects, but seemed always absorbed in drawings” (p. 7). Unsurprisingly, for a young person growing up during the Civil War, young Howard was preoccupied with things military and violent. Another factor in Pyle’s brief stay at the Fourth and West school was the influence of his mother Margaret. She became deeply influenced by the teaching of Christian mystic and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, and joined the Wilmington Swedenborgian church that was built and still stands at the corner of Delaware and Washington. As a result she was “read out” of her Quaker meeting and joined by the rest of her family in the mid-1860s, including Howard in the Swedenborgian faith. Pyle remained true to that faith throughout his life.

In another way his mother influenced Howard. If his Friends School education did not emphasize fine literature, Margaret did. She often read to him the works of Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Daniel Defoe, and others that opened his mind to adventure, heroic (and fell) deeds, and exploration. Pyle may have come from a long line of Quakers who espoused pacifism, but by his own admission, he had a “strong liking for pirates and for highwaymen, for gunpowder smoke, and hard blows” (from May, p. 4). These preferences were obvious in the body of his writing.

Over the course of his career, Pyle published twenty-three books. During the late 19th C., stories idealizing medieval times were extremely popular, and Pyle helped create and feed that interest in America: The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Otto of the Silver Hand, Men of Iron, the four King Arthur volumes, and others. All these works were written by Pyle and illustrated by him as well. He wrote countless stories published in the most popular magazines of his times, often illustrating them as well. Many dealt with one of his favorite themes: pirates. A decade after his death, friends and admirers gathered a selection of these tales and many of his most famous paintings into Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates, still in print and available at the Brandywine River Museum and the Delaware Art Museum.

Pyle was profoundly dedicated to celebrating American history and culture. Dozens of his stories and a great many of his paintings and illustrations portrayed American heroes of the Revolution and the Civil War. While implicitly honoring those battles and soldiers, his large canvases were, for their time, unusual in the degree to which they depicted the blood, wounds and grit of warfare. Like his friend Theodore Roosevelt, Pyle seemed to think warfare glorious–another way in which Pyle distanced himself from his Quaker past. How could Friends School claim Howard Pyle as one of its own?

sent at least five of them to Friends School. Their oldest daughter Phoebe, born in 1886, attended Friends’ kindergarten in its inaugural year, 1891. Two years later, her brother Theodore joined her, followed over the years by Howard, Jr., Godfrey and Wilfred. In June, 1908, young Godfrey appeared in a play, “The Magic Sword,” written by his aunt Katharine Pyle, Howard’s younger sister and sometime collaborator. The following year, in the recitals that led to Friends School’s graduation, a play based on one of Pyle’s Robin Hood stories, “The Merry Adventure with Midge the Miller,” was performed.

In 1911, Howard Pyle died while visiting Florence, Italy with members of his family. He was 58 years old.

These above-mentioned plays illustrate both the difference between Friends School of the 1860s and that of the 1890s20th C.–and why Howard Pyle supported the School by sending his children for almost twenty years. The School had come to embrace the arts. There were annual “Whittier” plays each March, and each school division performed playlets and tableaus in December and June. We have over twenty play programs between 1892 and 1910, and the school literary magazine, founded in 1886, was reviewing them. We can assume that the school kept that rented piano, and purchased others.

In a sense, Friends School had caught up with artistic creativity of Howard Pyle, and, it seems, he approved.

*Howard Pyle: Imagining an American School of Art (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2011). This book can be found at the Delaware Art Museum book store, as can dozens of Pyle riveting and brilliantly-colored paintings.

In the recitals that led to Friends School’s graduation, a play based on one of Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood stories, “The Merry Adventure with Midge the Miller,” was performed. The program is below.

Howard Pyle and daughter Phoebe, 1896. By Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864 -1952). Howard Pyle Manuscript Collection, Helen Farr Sloan Library and Archives, Delaware Art Museum