[“We Started to Run Back to the Raft For Our Lives,” Howard Pyle, 1902. Courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum.]

I was looking up this painting by the great American illustrator Howard Pyle, whose centennial I have been honoring in recent posts, when I found a blog devoted to the artist. Under a reproduction of this Pyle illustration of “Sinbad on Burrator” by A. T. Quiller Couch in Scribner’s Magazine for August 1902, the blog’s author Ian Schoenherr quotes this letter from the artist to William Merchant Richardson French, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, in June 22, 1905. These words express what every great artist knows, that though art depicts reality, its main source of knowledge is unseen:

…I think you may easily see that in the making of a successful picture, the artist must compose and arrange his figures and effects altogether from his imagination, and that there is very little opportunity in the making of such a picture for him to copy exactly the position of a model placed before him in the lights and shadows which the studios afford. Nor is it likely that he can find any background to copy accurately and exactly into such an imaginative picture.

For example: suppose an artist were called upon to paint a picture of a man running away from his enemies along the shores of a sea; with a gray sky overhead, and a strong wind blowing over the landscape. You see, he could not pose a model in the required position, for not only could no model hold such a position as that of a man running, with a center of gravity projected far beyond the point of impact; but even if the model were suspended in the air in such a position, yet he would not convey the idea of running. Apart from this it would be very difficult to find exactly the seascape to fit the picture, and exactly the landscape. For all this, the man must draw, not upon the facts of nature, but upon his imagination.

If I have expressed myself at all clearly, you will see that what a man needs to paint an imaginative picture of such a sort, is not the power of imitation, but the knowledge to draw a figure from imagination.…”

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