The Child Garden where Dreams are Distilled
December 7, 2014
Beyond continuing Howard Pyle’s American tradition of illustration, Sarah S. Stilwell (1878-1939) employed elements of symbolism, naturalism, and decorative ornamentation from Art Nouveau. A series of vignettes called “A Garden of Childhood,” appeared in the December 1900 issue of Harper’s Magazine, and in it Sarah defined gardens as places where doll and fairies come to life. The first illustration, “The Spirit of the Fairy,” appears with the caption, “There is a garden where the dream thoughts of children go, and whither they carry none of their troubles with them…” Sarah’s illustration depicts a lady, “the Mother of Wisdom,” who tells the children “wonderful things,” she can be found in gardens where nature is subdued, ordered, selected, and enclosed. Here, the spirit of the child was thought to emerge. Here, Sarah’s imagery suggests symbolic objects or spirits in the garden are forever on the threshold of becoming or being whatever the child breathes into them. They are private vessels (similar to dolls) into which hopes, fears, sorrow, and magic make-believe dreams are distilled.
In many cultures play serves a functional purpose in learning adult roles and life skills. Sarah may have grown up in rural Delaware County, Pennsylvania, but as an adult she enjoyed apartment living in Philadelphia. Her caption for “The Pine-tree” reveals a pragmatic philosophy of play: “Children played amid the branches in the pine-tree house… It seemed to the children that their play was very real, and they were inclined as seriously to it as grown-up people are serious about things in their life.”
A Girl in her Pinafore can go anywhere!
December 6, 2014
Sarah S. Stilwell-Weber was foremost a visual storyteller, her imagery reflecting fragile spontaneity of dreams and fairy tales with undercurrents of real tensions of the Industrial Age so that actions in her compositions jump beyond the boundaries of the page. A girl in her pinafore could go anywhere… and accomplish anything. Pinafores, wraparound garments like aprons were worn to protect girls’ clothes from soil; they were requisite for active outdoor play. Over the years, Stilwell-Weber turned this ordinary functional garment into an elaborate fashion statement with intricate floral fabric designs, laces, and even fringe.
In 1899, Stilwell illustrated Edward Sanford Martin’s The Luxury of Children and Some Other Luxuries (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1905). Humorist, poet, and essayist Edward Martin (1856-1939) offers insights on children and childhood that Stilwell illuminates with seven black and white plates tinted alternately with orange and green with images of children at play, study, meals during daily life. The Frontispiece “Easter-time” shows a girl with Easter eggs nested on a pillow on a sofa (green); “Feeding the chickens” shows a girl wearing a pinafore feeding chickens in front of a stone wall (orange); “A New Day” shows a girl rising in her bed from beneath a fluffy patchwork quilt and looking out the window at the new day (green); “Breakfast” shows a girl eating cereal as her mother places a glass of milk on the table featuring popular “Blue Willow” patterned dishes; “In School” features the same girl in a pinafore working on a lesson on cursive writing in a reader working on a small slate; “Sewing” shows a girl seated in a big chair piecing together squares for a quilt; “In Paddling” is a misty images of a girl wading along a shoreline; and “Shadow-Time” shows a girl seated on her mother’s lap in an embrace before bedtime.
Now, an aside on doll imagery for consideration
December 4, 2014
In 1896 Caswell Ellis (1871-1948) and G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924) published a survey that focused on how children play and interact psychologically with dolls. It also examined child rituals related to doll play such as naming, feeding, discipline, and how children created imaginary social lives for their dolls, which would be illuminated in illustrations by Sarah S. Stilwell. The Ellis & Hall study found that perhaps nothing so fully opens up the child’s soul in the same way that well-developed doll play does. Ellis and Hall reported: Whispered confidences with the doll are often more intimate and sacred than with any human being. The doll is taught those things learned best or in which the child has most interest. The little mother’s real ideas of morality are best seen in her punishments and rewards of her doll. Her favorite foods are those of her doll. The features of funerals, weddings, schools, and parties which are re-enacted with the doll, are those which have most deeply impressed the child. The child’s moods, ideals of life, dress, etc., come to utterance in free and spontaneous doll play.
The Ellis and Hall study found that the educational value of dolls was enormous, and that doll passion was strongest for children between the seven and ten years of age, reaching its climax between eight and nine. Ellis & Hall commented that a child’s doll: Educates the heart and will, even more than the intellect, and to learn how to control and apply doll play will be to discover a new instrument in education of the very highest potency. The study concluded that: Many children learn to sew, knit, and do millinery work, observe and design costumes, acquire taste in color, and even prepare food for the benefit of the doll. Children who are indifferent to reading for themselves sometimes read to their doll and learn things they would not otherwise do in order to teach it — or are clean, to be like it.
Let me briefly visit the seemingly conflicting issue of control related to doll play: while Victorian parents used dolls as instruments of control so that girls were taught the mundane tasks of domesticity — for girls — dolls became vehicles for flights of fancy. During doll play, girls made and controlled the rules for play, and dolls provided girls with freedom for self-expression. The irony was that with this imagined-freedom and control in doll play, girls also received the practical socialization and instruction that parents wanted them to get.
Dolls became neutral vessels for the children’s imaginations where they can work through the issues of their daily lives. The essence of “childness” is universal and timeless – children who can happily entertain themselves with an empty box once the novelty of the toy contained within that box has worn off; having the ability to create imaginary worlds that hold very real solutions; and these inner worlds are necessary. When our toys create total-entertainment-experiences, we do not need to develop our own imaginations, and thus, we loose our ability to imagine. If you look at creative people today, they need a lot of time alone – for whatever reason – this is the time and place where they develop ideas. When children are young, we need to provide them with space for imagining so they can discover practical insights and prepare for the adult world.
Source: Caswell Ellis and G. Stanley Hall, “A Study of Dolls,” Pedagogical Seminary 4 (December 1896): 129-175.
Designing the Girlish Ideal
December 3, 2014
Sarah S. Stilwell Weber (1878-1939) expanded commercial illustration with her unique decorative style and a flair for the exotic. Saturday Evening Post editor George Horace Lorimer (1867-1937) spotted her talent and offered a contract to contribute covers scheduled on a regular basis – however, she declined unsure of maintaining strict deadlines while retaining her artistic integrity with family obligations. Still, Stilwell-Weber managed to create about sixty Post covers between 1904 and 1921. Even when women had no vote, as a graphic artist, Stilwell-Weber earned an equivalent salary to a Supreme Court justice in 1910. As a mother, she brought realism to the subject of childhood when other female artists marketed nostalgia.
A search of census records revealed that Sarah was the youngest daughter of a harness maker named William Stilwell and his wife Isabella who lived in Concordville, Pennsylvania. She attended the Drexel Institute from 1895 to 1900, earning a certificate in Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. An art director from Colliers Weekly initiated her career as a commercial illustrator when he selected a drawing for publication in 1898.
Sarah was among the first female students to make use of studios at Chadd’s Ford along the Brandywine River operated by Howard Pyle (1853-1911). In an interview for Harper’s Weekly, Pyle explained that he wanted students, “to draw a human figure that appeared to stand upon its feet, to move easily and fluently with articulate joints, to breath and live.” She participated in Howard Pyle’s Brandywine classes in the summer of 1899 and February 1900 on scholarships. When Pyle established his school in Wilmington, Delaware, she joined him to continue her studies.
Pyle, who also came from a family with a leather-related business, had the ability to recognize and cultivate budding talent that made him a master teacher. Pyle was concerned about the total visual layout of pages; he taught students the importance of good pictorial composition. Pyle encouraged students to draw the human face and figure from memory rather than to rely continually on models” – Sarah’s career blossomed under his tutelage.
The Hunt, Satisfied… Re-searching Sarah S. Stilwell
December 2, 2014
For researchers and book collectors, the hunt offers thrills that uncover treasures from the past. My first in-depth research project was about a then long-forgotten female illustrator named Sarah S. Stilwell Weber (1878-1939) who came to me through a call for papers for a volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography on American illustrators. In the end, right before the book went to press, the editors dropped this fantastic artist from the project because she was thought to have had too little output over her career. However, for me, it was too late, I was hooked, but on some level I felt I had failed her by not providing a comprehensive enough profile to convince the editors of her place in American book illustration annals.
In the age of research before Google searches and BookFinder.com, along with the vast amount of digitization had commenced, I was reliant upon the Readers’ Guide to Periodic Literature for doing initial research. This revealed a vague reference to a book by Richard le Gallienne (1866-1947) but cited no title. When I searched OCLC I found a promising title, Mr. Sun and Mrs. Moon (1902), but had no mention of Sarah S. Stilwell. The Gleason Library at University of San Francisco had a copy in its special collections, and on a hunch, I called the librarian and made an appointment and made my way to Lone Mountain.
MME with her find. Photographed by R.I. Otterbach, 2014.
When the special collections librarian brought the slim volume out, he looked almost apologetic. I remember being left alone with Mr. Sun and Mrs. Moon and opening it to the title page and sure enough, no illustrator was named. The dedication featured a circular photograph of a lovely young Eva Le Gallienne (1899-1991) before her mother Julie Norregard took her to live in Paris:
“To Eva,
Eva, we were so glad you came,
For life is such a lonely game
With only one to play it, dear –
As Hesper for six long years;
But now the games you have, you two!
We are so glad you came – are you?”
The poems, written with much tenderness, reveal a family in stress. Eva was the daughter of a second marriage that was short-lived, while her older sister Hesper is the daughter of Le Gallienne’s first wife who died in 1894. Even with so much love, there is also a strange ambivalence in the verses. The imagery, however, was light, celestial. As I looked at the strange singular style, I was struck by their dreamy gentle styling. The illustrator’s only apparent signifier was two slippers (that on closer inspection were two small “S”s side-by-side), and in one there were a few scrawled “S”s in the carpet. A chill went down my spine – the illustrations were HERS – just small marks hidden in texture – transparent within a very private book of published verses as if the illustrator were an outsider looking into Mr. Sun and Mrs. Moon’s unsettled lives on the verge of collapse.
I breathed: oh my God! That which had been hidden to me, came into view. I would have that response many times again in my research afterward, but never with the same sense of discovering treasure.
“We are so glad you came – are you?”
For a sampling of Sarah Stilwell Weber’s work, check Illustration Art Solutions online:
http://www.illustration-art-solutions.com/sarah-stilwell.html
Discovering the imagery of American female illustrators
December 1, 2014
Before Thanksgiving, I was talking to a colleague at the J. Paul Leonard Library about how students have changed in recent years. She referred me to the 2012 Learning Curve Study: How College Graduates Solve Problems Once They Join the Workplace, by Alison J. Head.
http://projectinfolit.org/images/pdfs/pil_fall2012_workplacestudy_fullreport_revised.pdf
Reading this small but intriguing study, I encourage any reader who enjoys this blog to explore on their own, I will share primary resources used as I go along.
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Known as a woman ahead of her time, Katherine Pyle (1863-1938) was a brilliant and vital individual whose career would never eclipse that of her older brother Howard Pyle. Pyle’s first published work was a childhood poem called “The Piping Shepherd” that appeared in Atlantic Monthly. She studied art at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, and with her brother at the Drexel Institute. Howard encouraged his sister to pursue a career in writing and illustrating books and included her verses in his book called The Wonder Clock, or Four and Twenty Marvelous Tales, One for Each Day of the Week (1887) published by Harper & Brothers.
Raised in the Quaker faith, Katherine Pyle became an active member of the Swedenborgian Church, and was known for her immense community spirit. Pyle was greatly concerned with local troubled youth that led to her involvement with the Juvenile Court in Wilmington, Delaware where she pressed for social reforms, often helping those in need, even at her own expense. Friends fondly remember her for having one blue eye and one brown eye.
During her career, Pyle illustrated about thirty books including the 1925 edition of Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. Early in here career, she collaborated with Drexel classmates including Jessie Wilcox Smith, Sarah S. Stilwell Weber and Bertha Carson Day; often providing texts for others to publish as first publications. Although she illustrated a number of books for other authors, her own stories were drawn from myths, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and animal stories.
As a prominent female artist of her day, Pyle’s work was at times controversial due to her dramatic imagery for fairy tales and myths. In 1923, the editor of Child Life upon receiving two of her fairy tales commented that their editorial policy was to keep out “the horror element and adult experience from Child Life stories as much as possible.” Pyle contended that evil always defeated itself in traditional fairy tales and that good always triumphed. Pyle’s artwork is reminiscent to Howard’s illustrative style; although her compositions tend to be less complex, and she employed vibrant color for great effect.
The Katherine Pyle Papers are available in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library:
http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/findaids/pyle_k.htm
Illustration by Katherine Pyle; “Dragon Rearing up to Reach Medieval Knight on Ledge online:
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