Page 48 - The Hunt - Fall 2024

“I think people expect for me to do something a little different. Otherwise, they’d just have a photograph taken.” —Linda Harris Reynolds
Another branch of realism caught hold about a century later—this time in Delaware, where Wilmington-born Howard Pyle started his own art school in 1900 to teach painters realism, a style fueled by the growing demand for mostly heroic, full-color illustrations for adventure books and the thriving magazine trade. Pyle attracted a number of talented students to his school, among them Frank Schoonover, Allen Tupper True and Thornton Oakley. Her instructed them all at his studio and on extended field trips to
Chadds Ford.
Particularly notable was a somewhat eccentric recruit from
Massachusetts. N.C. Wyeth excelled at illustration and subsequently taught his own children to paint, including three talented daughters, Henriette, Carolyn and Ann, and one of his two sons, Andrew, who would become the most famous and successful of all the painters who worked and lived along Brandywine Creek. Andrew’s son, Jamie—still quite active at 78—is the last member of the three-generation Wyeth dynasty.
Earlier this year, PAFA suddenly announced it would graduate its final class of students in 2025, becoming solely a museum after 220 years of teaching. With no dominant art school and no titular leader, what will become of the Brandywine tradition of rural realism?
46 THE HUNT MAGAZINE
fall 2024