EXTRACTS: Pirates! Illustrators Special Edition © 2020 The Book Palace (128 PAGES in Full edition)

77 Pyle, a painter. It was through his mother that Pyle got in‐ terested in reading and drawing. He dreamed of one day becoming a teller of tales such as ‘Robinson Crusoe’, ‘Grimm’s German Fairy Tales’, ‘The Arabian Nights’, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Wonder Book’. He eagerly pored over picture books and illustrations he found in the American and British magazines of the day, and practiced his skill at drawing by copying the many images he found there. He daydreamed his days away at the Friend’s School inWilmington, and during a short stint at a private school. His parents were pretty much set on him enrolling at a uni‐ versity after he finished his schooling, but Pyle had dreams of going to Europe and becoming a painter over there. His parents finally relented and allowed him to begin studying art instead of going to college. However, financial problems had him search for artistic guidance in America instead, ending a long tradition that artists had to travel abroad to study art. At the age of sixteen, he began his art studies with the Belgian artist Van der Weilen at his studio, where he remained for three years. This comprised all the art training he ever got—aside from a few lessons he took later at the Art Students League in New York. When he returned home, he spent his early twenties helping his father in the family business, but continued to practice his drawing and writing skills at home. In 1876, he travelled with his father to the Chincoteague Islands, just off Virginia, where he compiled an illustrated narrative of his trip. Satisfied with what he had done, he sent it off to Scribner’s Monthly , an illustrated American literary periodical, along with some verses he had written about the place. His submission was accepted, and one of the magazine’s owners, Roswell Smith, saw the talent the young man possessed, and encouraged him to move over to New York and pursue a career in the illustration field. This urged Pyle to submit this time a fairy tale to St. FACING PAGE AND ABOVE: Who Shall be Captain? , oil on canvas, 1908. It was one of thirty Pyle works put on display at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City in 1908. Harper and Brothers had the right to reproduce it, but they didn’t exercise that right for a couple of years. The picture appeared, at last, in Harper’s Monthly in January 1911, with the title tweaked to read ‘Which Shall Be Captain?’ It also went by the name ‘The Fight on the Sands’ at the Harper offices, according to Pyle. It features nevertheless some very menacing pirates, although some bear cartoony faces with bulging eyes that might lead some viewers to believe this was nothing but a caricature. But, oh those faces are just so well done. Notice how they all have very different and distinctive features. This image has been used and abused in every pirate comic book ever done.