Images from the Delaware Art Museum collection.

The Pre-Raphaelite collection at the museum is the best I’ve seen outside England, and has the largest number of paintings by Dante Gabriel Rosetti, one of the founders of the movement. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as they called themselves, flourished in the second half of England’s 19th Century into the early 20th Century, and their name comes from the idea that they wanted to look back to Medieval times for artistic inspiration, before the Renaissance artists epitomized by Raphael. They also drew inspiration from natural forms. A good example is this book cover design in pen and ink by William Morris, my favorite creator of the group. It’s the only piece they have by him, but it’s a gem because it shows Morris’s process in the notes on the right. Continue reading →

Images from the collection of the Delaware Art Museum.

After enjoying the Howard Pyle galleries, Ellen and I continued to the American Illustration galleries. The museum seems to have a large collection in this area, which is only fitting since many of the top American Illustrators studied in Wilmington, Delaware, the home of Howard Pyle’s illustration school. I don’t know that Frank Leyendecker was one of them, but this is a charming cover for “The Country Gentleman” magazine from 1918 of a soldier writing home and the spirit of his mother embracing him. Continue reading →

Images from the Delaware Art Museum collections.

For my birthday this year, Ellen and I went to the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington, Delaware and enjoyed an impressive collection of art that’s right in my centers of interest. I have lots of pictures, so I’m going to spread them over three posts, beginning with the work of Howard Pyle (1853-1911).

Pyle was a native of Wilmington with a long career as a painter, magazine illustrator, author and teacher. The museum has a large and excellent display of his illustrations and paintings, several with a pirate theme, as above attack on a spanish galleon. Continue reading →