The Brandywine tradition

About this book

The Brandywine is a river, and a valley, running from southeastern Pennsylvania into Delaware, still ""a pastoral landscape dotted with structures of indigenous stone,"" where a Revolutionary battle was fought and fashioned into legend, where a tradition of romantic illustration arose around Howard Pyle and, tempered by the strictures of pure form, continues in the person of Andrew Wyeth. This is auspiciously timed: the issuance of the magnum Wyeth opus will concentrate attention on his antecedents. Father N. C. Wyeth was Pyle's most famous pupil and Pyle, more significant as teacher than as artist, emerges most vividly via N. C.'s recollections. Mr. Pitz, a self-designated second generation Pylet light (at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art), integrates other students' experiences also, and he knows the Wyeth dynasty well. It's an assiduous ordering of particulars, only an eddy in art history perhaps, but with the many illustrations (in color and black-and-white), an ingratiating reminder of affirmative insularity.