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Come and learn about Pyle and the Pre-Raphaelites, an exhibition that brings together two of the Delaware Art Museum’s signature collections: the founding collection of work by Howard Pyle, the artist who created an American illustration tradition, and Samuel Bancroft’s collection of British Pre-Raphaelite art, which is the largest concentration of Pre-Raphaelite work outside of the United Kingdom. This exhibition premiers new research that reveals the men were far more intertwined than previously recognized and that Pyle was inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites before Bancroft began acquiring their work in 1890. By displaying Pyle’s illustrations for stories set in the Medieval and Early Renaissance eras alongside works by Pre-Raphaelite artists and their followers, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, and William Morris, this show articulates the extent to which Pyle was inspired by Pre-Raphaelite compositions he encountered in his early career as well as in Bancroft’s collection. Further, this show demonstrates how Pyle’s exposure to original works of Pre-Raphaelite art shaped the birth and flourishing of American illustration.

The talk will be presented by DelArt Curatorial Associate Katherine Feldkamp, who curated Pyle and the Pre-Raphaelites. She graduated with a master’s degree in Art History from the University of Delaware, and previously served as the Research Assistant for the Decorative Arts and Design Department at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Image: So for a Heart-beat She Saw Him, (detail) 1905 for “The Fox Brush: Retold from the French of Nicolas de Caen,” by James Branch Cabell, in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, August 1905. Howard Pyle (1853–1911). Oil on canvas, 24 1/8 × 16 1/8 in. Delaware Art Museum, Gayle and Alene Hoskins Endowment Fund, 1983.