By Victor Greto
CHADDS FORD, Pa. — It’s his favorite picture.
Leaning forward to gaze more intently into the eyes of his grandfather’s 1901 painting, “A Dream of Young Summer,” Howard Brokaw adjusts his finger-smeared reading glasses in front of his brown eyes, which are rimmed by rings of dazzling blue.
“It’s a wonderful composition,” he said, squinting at the Howard Pyle oil-on-canvas of a gorgeous female angel in red and white; her ruby lips delicately blow through a reedy pipe while her almond-shaped eyes gaze at the viewer.
Call it a Swedenborgian side-excursion that Pyle — and other artists during the late 19th century — occasionally took in their work. Emanuel Swedenborg was an 18th-century Swedish theologian and Christian mystic who came to believe he saw angels and demons, and whose other-worldly musing influenced a slew of sentimental Victorian painters.
Brokaw purchased it many years ago for $2,500 from a man in New England.
“The idea is beautifully done. And everyone likes looking at a beautiful girl.”
The painting had hung for many years near the entrance to his kitchen, says Brokaw, 91, whose slim form and rough-hewn voice reminds one of a wizened Ralph Bellamy.
Brokaw and his wife, Mary Ann — whom he affectionately calls Dede — recently donated their Howard Pyle collection of more than 100 paintings and illustrations, plus a variety of books, letters and journals, to the Brandywine River Museum. The first group of about 40 paintings and drawings are now on exhibit.
It’s a premature donation of sorts because Brokaw already had willed his paintings to the museum.
“But I’m not anywhere near dying because I’m only 91,” he said. “And I thought, What if I had a fire in my house?”
All good reasons, but it also may be because Brokaw now lives alone in his large Greenville home. He visits his wife twice a day at a nearby assisted-living facility, where she moved more than a year ago. Their four children live around the continent, from western Canada to Puerto Rico.
The first floor of Brokaw’s home had been filled with Pyle’s works, he says. Once they were donated, he brought down many of the non-Pyle paintings that graced the second and third floors of his home.
“Now, my third floor’s walls are empty,” he said.
Brokaw’s smile ends almost as soon as it begins. “I have enough to fill it all up again, though.”
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Howard Pyle is Brokaw’s literal grandfather, but he is the figurative grandfather of the Brandywine School of art.
None of the artistry of the more famous Wyeths — from N.C. to Andrew to Jamie — would exist without Pyle’s example and teaching skill.
Born in 1853 in Wilmington, Pyle flourished as an illustrator from the time he was 26 until his death in 1911 in Italy at the age of 58.
During his teaching career, which began at what became Drexel University, and on to his own summer school in Chadds Ford, Pyle trained a slew of future great artists, including Maxfield Parrish, Frank Schoonover and N.C. Wyeth.
Through his children’s book illustrations, Pyle helped create the swaggering look of the pirates we’re all familiar with. He also created the more sanitized, children’s version of the old, very bloody English Robin Hood legend. Pyle’s version is memorialized in the 1938 Hollywood movie.
Book illustrations were his first love, Pyle said. He grew up with his mother reading to him from picture books.
As he wrote in 1903, “A number of pictures hung on the walls of our house…that were thought to be good pictures in those days. But we — my mother and I — liked the pictures in the books the best of all. I may say to you in confidence that even to this very day I still like the pictures you find in books better than wall pictures.”
It’s a love shared by his grandson, who remains thrilled at Pyle’s pirate illustrations above all else.
“Everyone loves pirates now,” Brokaw says. “We’re not chasing them anymore.”
But the “illustrator” moniker bothered Pyle. He overcame it through his dedication to his art, which came to be admired by some of the greatest practitioners of the form. He was studying mural paintings in Italy when he died.
In a letter to his brother, Vincent Van Gogh wrote that Pyle’s work “struck me dumb with admiration.”
“There’s a reason why Van Gogh could like Pyle,” says Joyce Hill Stoner, professor and consultant with the Winterthur-University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation.
“He wasn’t just illustrating things,” she said. “He employed wonderful principles of dynamic forms and abstract shapes.”
In fact, even if you don’t think much of “A Dream of Young Summer,” one can at least see that Pyle had mastered that pre-Raphaelite proclivity for virginal female beauty.
Great artists master styles, and then break out on their own.
Take Pyle’s 1892 “The Wreck,” a sea landscape that, Stoner says, “an art historian would have a lot of trouble placing. Without looking at the signature, they could well ascribe it to (Gustave) Courbet, (the French realist painter), around 1860.”
But what excited Van Gogh and other masters was Pyle’s proto-modern sense of the abstract.
In 1909’s “The Wolf and Dr. Wilkinson,” Pyle created a sense of excitement in not only the movement of a wolf chasing a man — whose one leg is expertly foreshortened, and whose waving cape evokes a flurry of fear — but even in the snow on which the man is running.
“The yellow moon is full of impasto (thick paint), the snow is alive with brush work,” Stoner said. “You get excited. It’s a real painting. He overdid what you need to do to do an illustration, and made it into an accomplished painting.”
If one turned the painting upside down, it still would evoke a sense of excitement, Stoner says.
Many of Pyle’s paintings express a bold feeling for color. This is, in part, due to his experience illustrating for publications.
“He was good about understanding the limits of reproduction of magazines,” Stoner says. “He very cleverly figures things with strong lights and darks and with a limited palette.”
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Born in Wilmington in 1916, Brokaw never knew his grandfather.
But he learned a lot about him from his mother — Pyle’s daughter, Phoebe — and his grandmother, Anne Poole Pyle, Howard Pyle’s widow.
Brokaw’s father worked for DuPont, and the family moved near a gunpowder plant in Tennessee after the United States entered World War I in 1917. After the war, they moved near a DuPont plant in Newark, N.J.
It was there where his grandmother Anne would spend several weeks at a time with the family.
“I liked her and she liked me,” Brokaw recalls. “She’d sleep in a big double-bed, and in the morning I’d run off and get into the bed with her, and we’d talk.”
He also got to know Pyle’s long-time secretary Gertrude Brinckle, who told him how his grandfather worked.
“When he wanted to paint a picture, he’d sit down with pen and paper and he couldn’t be disturbed,” Brokaw says. “He’d sit there for half an hour and sketch. Only then did he go into his studio, where he would use models.”
Brokaw attended Princeton and majored in chemical engineering — “Dad talked me into it,” he says — and earned a Masters Degree in 1938.
He worked for DuPont until he was 59, and for the following 30 years, he and Dede traveled extensively throughout the world, touching each continent. They visited his grandfather’s grave in Florence, Italy.
“They don’t even know who he was,” Brokaw said of many of the Italians he knew.
He had met Dede at Rehoboth Beach, where his family owned a home, and where Howard Pyle had vacationed often.
In a picture in the exhibit that had been taken in Rehoboth Beach, Pyle imperiously leans back into a straight-backed chair, holds a cane and looks off into the distance.
Near this picture hangs one taken more than three decades ago, of Howard Brokaw standing, with hands on hips, in front of a full-size picture of his grandfather, who also has his hands on his hips. Brokaw is smiling, almost giddy.
Pyle’s mouth shows a much tighter smile, and he wears a monocle and what appears to be a painting shirt. Despite the smile and the shirt and the monocle, he still looks, well, imperious.
Brokaw got into collecting his grandfather’s work by accident.
He already owned a handful of paintings, which he had gotten from his mother and grandmother. But it wasn’t until he had a conversation with Andrew Wyeth that he decided to become a collector.
During the early 1960s, Wyeth asked Brokaw if he collected any of Pyle’s pictures.
“No,” he told Wyeth. “You should,” Wyeth replied.
That’s all it took.
One of the first paintings Brokaw acquired, in 1965, was a picture the Delaware Art Museum had passed on, “On the way to Tyburn,” an 1890 illustration.
Take a walk with Brokaw through the exhibit, and he tells stories about all of the works — how each was acquired, how much it cost, why it appeals to him.
Take 1905’s “The Spy,” an oil painting of a woman on a horse sitting side-saddle, holding a pistol and looking around warily.
“My mother-in-law gave it me,” Brokaw said. “It came from a friend of hers who hated the picture. Really hated it. She sold it to her for $75. And then she gave it to me.”
Nice.
Another, 1895’s “The Constitution’s Last Fight,” depicting the USS Constitution in a raging sea battle, is a gorgeous, quasi-abstract study in degrees of furious gray.
“It was owned by a woman in England,” Brokaw said. “She had given it to her daughter in Connecticut. I looked at the picture, and it had a serious problem up top. I called the woman in England. She wanted $500. A conservator said it would cost $130 to fix it. So, she took $130 less.”
Howard gazes at the depiction of fury his grandfather had created 113 years ago.
“I mean, what the hell,” he says, either referring to the cheap price, or the glorious power of the art, or both.
“It’s a very exciting picture.”