N. C. Christopher Couch University of Massachusetts Amherst The Brandywine School and Comic Art The only distinctly American art is to be found in the art of illustration. Howard Pyle William Randolph Hearst surrounded himself with visual art. Whether in his lavish personal life, where his residences were filled with paintings and tapestries from his buying trips to Europe, or in his journalistic life, where he followed the lead of Joseph Pulitzer and filled his newspapers with drawings, cartoons and illustrations, or later, in his romantic life, where he placed his mistress Marion Davies in elaborate costume drama films that displayed her personal beauty while burying her very real acting talent, Hearst reveled in, understood the power of, and manipulated art and imagery throughout his life and his careers. Perhaps ironically, the pictures that he patronized that were ultimately the most important and most influential were those that would, by most observers, be accorded the lowest social status. His art collection is today all but forgotten, and the motion pictures he produced are unknown to all but scholars of the history of film. However, the illustrations for his newspaper’s journalistic pages played an immediate political and historical role and continue to be reproduced. And the comic strips for the Sunday funnies that appeared in his own newspapers were also widely syndicated to many others across the United States and around the world through his King Features Syndicate. Many of them continue to be reprinted in books and deeply influence the growing fields of comic art and graphic novels. N. C. Christopher Couch, « The Brandywine School and Comic Art », Jean-François Chassay et Bertrand Gervais [éds], Paroles, textes et images. Formes et pouvoirs de l’imaginaire, Université du Québec à Montréal, Figura, Centre de recherche sur le texte et l’imaginaire, coll. « Figura », no 19, vol. 1, p. 193-217. THE BRANDYWINE SCHOOL AND COMIC ART Hearst was well aware of the power of the journalistic images he placed in his newspapers. In 1897, he sent the artist Frederick Remington to Cuba to accompany the reporters that he had assigned to cover what were said to be the revolutionary activities of Cuban insurgents who were fighting against the Spanish imperial government. In a story that is probably apocryphal, but indicative of the power of images, Remington was reported to have informed Hearst by telegram that there was no military activity in opposition to the Spanish government or its soldiers. In Hearst’s supposed reply, also by telegram, he instructed the artist to depict the subjects he had been sent to find, whether or not they existed: “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”1 Remington’s drawings were in fact satirized by one of Hearst’s own cartoonists. Several months before the war began, in a comic strip series called The Huckleberry Volunteers, Richard F. Outcault showed a group of children establishing a volunteer military group and going off to fight in Cuba; the group included Outcault’s own famous cartoon character, the Yellow Kid. In one of their first military engagements, they ride as cavalry on wooden carousel horses. One of the horses wears a tag that reads By F. Remington.2 Whether or not the story of Hearst and Remington is apocryphal, its imbrication in the literature of Yellow Journalism and the development of ideals of objectivity in American journalism, and the satire of Remington’s work by one of the most famous cartoonists of the day, helps establish the rarely-linked but significant and revealing connections between journalistic illustration, American art and magazine and book illustration, and cartoons and comics strips which, like 1 David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 127; Peggy and Harold Samuels, Frederic Remington, a Biography (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1982), 248-249. 2 Bill Blackbeard, “The Yellow Kid, The Yellow Decade,” in Richard F. Outcault, The Yellow Kid (Northampton: Kitchen Sink Press, 1995), 123. [194] N. C. CHRISTOPHER COUCH illustrations, were indispensable components of newspapers, magazines and books. The Brandywine School of Illustration The turn of the twentieth century is often referred to as the Golden Age of American Illustration.3 Increasingly sophisticated printing technology, a larger and better educated population, and the growth of cities and industry led to economic and social conditions that supported an ever-increasing variety of illustrated magazines as well as the publication of a wide variety of illustrated books. Among the best-known publishers were the Harper and Brothers Company, publisher of the magazines Harper’s Monthly and Harper’s Weekly, as well as a wide variety of books by American and European authors, and Scribner’s publishers, which also published an eponymous monthly magazine and books of fiction and nonfiction, in close competition with Harper’s. The most widely-circulated illustrated magazine not associated with a book publisher was Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, which covered American and international news, as well as cultural and social topics and events. With rare exceptions, like Remington, the artists who drew illustrations for the news and features of the newspapers and the weekly magazines focused on news like Frank Leslie’s (which at times identified itself as a weekly illustrated newspaper) were anonymous journeymen. However, the monthly magazines featured artists who were encouraged to draw in distinctive, individual styles and whose names were prominently displayed on their works. Among the artists who achieved fame in the magazines were Winslow Homer, Edward Austin Abbey, Arthur B. Frost, Charles Stanley Reinhart, and many others. 3 Lucien L. Agosta, Howard Pyle (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 23. [195] THE BRANDYWINE SCHOOL AND COMIC ART In the late 1870s, a new artist jointed the ranks of the Harper’s regulars. Howard Pyle was an artist from Wilmington, Delaware, who had studied in Philadelphia before moving to New York to pursue his artistic career. Although Pyle launched his career and began to develop his mature style in New York City, after returning to Delaware he became an influential teacher and an artist whose work influenced other illustrators. He created studio space at his home, and offered intensive instruction in the techniques and ideals of illustration that he had perfected for his own work to small groups of highly select students. Pyle also taught a number of summer school sessions in an old grist mill in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, on the Brandywine River.4 Pyle’s students became some of the most famous illustrators in America, including Jessie Wilcox Smith, Frank Schoonover, Maxfield Parrish, Harvey Dunn and many others.5 The most famous and successful of them was N. C. Wyeth, whose Scribner’s illustrated classics series have been continuously in print since their original publication, and who launched a dynasty of American artists, including Andrew and Jamie Wyeth.6 The close association of Pyle and the Wyeths with the Brandywine River Valley eventually led to the group of artists of which they were the most prominent being named the Brandywine School.7 Today, Pyle is best known as a children’s book author and illustrator. Pyle brought to life in romantic text and extensive illustrations the stories of Robin Hood (1883) and King Arthur (1903-1910) and helped revive interest in folk tales through his illustrated collections of traditional tales and his own new 4 Agosta, 7-20; Douglas Allen and Douglas Allen, Jr. N. C. Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations and Murals (New York: Crown 1972), 19-26. 5 Agosta, 20-21. 6 Allen and Allen, 79-118. 7 Robert McLanathan, The Brandywine Heritage, Brandywine River Museum with the New York Graphics Society, 1971, 8. [196] N. C. CHRISTOPHER COUCH stories in the folk tale idiom. During his lifetime, however, Pyle was equally well known for his illustrations for works of nonfiction, and also for historically-based fiction. These works appeared primarily in magazines, especially Harper’s, but in other prominent magazines as well. Harper’s, Scribner’s, the Atlantic, Century Magazine and others published both fiction and nonfiction by the most prominent authors and journalists of the day. From Mark Twain to Theodore Roosevelt, they featured new fiction and historical and journalistic articles on a variety of topics. Pyle began his career doing many different kinds of illustrations, and also was quickly able to move to the best children’s magazine of the day, St. Nicholas, edited by Mary Mapes Dodge. But once he became an established artist, he began to specialize in certain types of illustrations. In his illustrations for nonfiction and historical fiction, he quickly followed his own passions, concentrating on the American Colonial Period, the American Revolution, and Caribbean pirates. Pyle devoted himself to research on these topics, investigating settings and landscape, weaponry and costumes, down to the smallest detail, and collecting costumes and props for reference and for use in posing models or creating reference photographs.8 In addition to illustrating historical fiction and nonfiction articles by other writers, Pyle soon began writing as well. Although his masterworks remain his books on Robin Hood, King Arthur, and other chivalric romances like Otto of the Silver Hand, he quickly became an author of nonfiction and historical fiction for magazines like Harper’s. His articles and stories dealt primarily with Colonial New England and the topic that perhaps fascinated him most, pirates. Pyle’s pirate articles were collected in his Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates.9 8 Elizabeth Nesbitt, Howard Pyle (London: The Bodley Head, 1966), 59-60. 9 Howard Pyle, Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates (New York: Harper [197] THE BRANDYWINE SCHOOL AND COMIC ART Thus Pyle’s early career, both as a writer and as an illustrator, soon came to be dominated by nonfiction and historical fiction dealing with the periods and interests that he found most congenial.