The Brandywine River Museum of Art is holding a lecture series exploring the impact of World War I on regional illustrators.
A century ago, the U.S. was in the the throws of the first truly international war and several students of late Wilmington illustrator Howard Pyle were there to draw it first hand.
"There were pictures of the trenches, of the hospitals and the field stations. Just every aspect of the war was covered," Curator Christine Podmaniczky said.
At a time when photography wasn’t foolproof, eight illustrators, four of which were Pyle's students, deployed to document the war in Europe.
But their drawings were often censored by the government, Podmaniczky said. Officials would often us illustrations from artists who stayed home during the conflict, including regional artists N.C. Wyeth and Frank Schoonover.
"They gave much more of a sense of American heroism than some of these drawings and sketches and paintings that were coming back from the front."
The first lecture Over There and Over Here: The Students of Howard Pyle Go to War was June 14.
On the Home Front: N.C. Wyeth and World War I is scheduled for June 19 and Andrew Wyeth's Great War is September 13.
The Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, PA has an extensive collection of works of the Wyeth family and regional illustration, still life and landscape artwork.
Delaware Public Media' s arts coverage is made possible, in part, by support from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
