Howard Pyle | 1853-1911 It is perhaps not surprising that Howard Pyle, the premier artist of the "Golden Age of American Illustration," would have espoused American training for American artists. Pyle resisted the idea of going to Europe literally until the end of his life (he died of a kidney infection while visiting Italy) because he felt that Europe exerted too great a hold on the imagination and even talent of American artists. Yet much of the work that influenced Pyle in his youth was European, and many of the subjects that he pursued so distinctively in his mature work were European as well. As a child growing up in Delaware, Pyle learned the art of storytelling from children's classics such as Grimm's fairy tales, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Robinson Crusoe. From illustrated editions of authors including Dickens and Thackeray, Pyle first began to study the interaction of written text and art. In the Pre-Raphaelites artists Pyle's mother favored, he began to understand the ways in which color, line, and detail combine to tell a visual story. Pyle studied technique in Philadelphia before heading to New York in 1876 to pursue a career in illustration and writing at magazines such as Scribner's Monthly, Harper's, and St. Nicholas, an important children's magazine. In 1883, Pyle illustrated and authored The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, a volume which brought him considerable fame. In it, one could see Pyle's theory of pictures and illustrations as drama. He followed Robin Hood with fairy tales, historical fiction, and eventually his four-volume King Arthur, between 1903 and 1910. In the years that Pyle worked as an illustrator and an author, he was a teacher as well, serving on the faculty of Drexel Institute of Arts and Sciences in Philadelphia and then opening his own school in his native Wilmington, Delaware. Pyle's students, including Maxfield Parrish and N.C. Wyeth, were known collectively as the Brandywine School, a group known for its use of color and for its exploration of American subjects.