Pyles & Wyeths

Every U. S. citizen under 40 who ever had a middle-class home or a children's library card knows the illustrations of Howard Pyle and N. C. (Newell Convers) Wyeth. Together they were and are the chief artistic pride of Wilmington, Del., and their abundant families and pupils continue to paint like fury. Last week a young Wyeth and a young Pyle again took first and second honors in the 24th annual triple-exhibition of Delaware Artists, Pupils of Howard Pyle and Members of the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, held on the second floor of Wilmington's public library, facing neat Rodney Square.

History and adventure have never been the same since Howard Pyle put his hand to them. Born in 1853 of old Delaware stock, he heard from his great-grandmother eyewitness tales of the rout of the Continental Army at Brandywine. When he grew up, Howard Pyle found one of his studios in an old mill near the Pyle ancestral farmhouse on Brandywine Stream. A broad-shouldered, benevolent six-footer, he made his Revolutionary soldiers, pirates, merry men, knights and men-at-arms so nutbrown, brawny and handsome, steeped their adventures in such romantic color, that Theodore Roosevelt lustily approved, frequently had him as a White House guest. In the decade before his death in 1911 he never made less than $25,000 a year.

Not only an illustrator but a writer of children's books, Howard Pyle was followed in both fields by his accomplished sister Katharine, who still "lives in Wilmington. Best known Pyle pupils were Maxfield Parrish, the late Jessie Willcox Smith and N. C. Wyeth. Nearest to the master in spirit, big. burly Painter Wyeth lives at Chadds Ford in a rambling brick house with a barn-size studio, supposedly on the site of one of Anthony Wayne's old gun emplacements beside Brandywine Stream.

In a reminiscence written ten years after Pyle's death he described Pyle's summer art classes "working in the spacious and grain-scented rooms'' of the mill studio. "To recall the unceasing soft rush of water as it flowed over the huge, silent wheel beneath us thrills me through." This capacity for simple, lush feeling is one of the qualities which have enabled Wyeth to score even more imaginative knockouts on Christmas book readers than his teacher. In 30 years he has done illustrations for 24 juvenile classics for Scribner's alone, some 500 color paintings and several highly-paid mural jobs.

Even more pleased is Artist Wyeth that his "very domestic" wife has never painted, that three of his five children do. A Wyeth maxim is that "no college ever turned out a first-rate artist." The only nonartistic Wyeth child is Nathaniel. 25, who is also the only one who went to school after the age of 12. His wife is a Pyle. Ann, 22, does not paint but writes music. Her husband paints. Andrew, 20, already paints so well that his first one-man show in Manhattan's Macbeth Gallery last month was a sellout. Henriette, 29, married to Painter Peter Kurd, won first prize in the Wilmington show from 1931 to 1936.

In Wilmington last week. Wyeth's daughter Carolyn, 26, buxom and black-eyed like all the Wyeth girls, won first prize with her first landscape. She says she prefers "strong subjects, like squash and calla lilies." Second prizewinner this year as last was Howard Pyle's nephew, Walter Pyle Jr. Other exhibiting Pyles were Mary Miller Pyle and Margery Pyle, second cousins-in-law.

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