Howard Pyle’s “Bunker Hill”

This is Howard Pyle’s painting of “The Battle of Bunker Hill,” created in 1897.

As Ian Schoenherr discussed here, Pyle had a commission to paint several scenes from the American Revolution for Scribner’s Magazine, which was publishing Henry Cabot Lodge’s The Story of the Revolution in serial installments.

Pyle tried to imagine the scene accurately from one spot on the slope of Breed’s Hill, with Copp’s Hill in the left background, the grenadiers of the 52nd Regiment of Foot in the center, and the smoke from H.M.S. Lively’s guns mixing with the smoke from burning Charlestown behind them. He reportedly sought information from the British Admiralty about military details (though I would have thought an army source would be more helpful).

Even then Pyle wasn’t satisfied with his first attempt. He slashed that canvas with a sword and started over. He then produced something close to this final image in four days.

Pyle sent the canvas to the Scribner’s office so it could be prepared for reproduction in black and white. But he still didn’t consider the picture to be complete, calling it “unfinished in all of its details” and “crude in color.” Balking at the publisher’s proposal to send his paintings on a publicity tour, Pyle asked for this canvas back so he could keep polishing the details.

Behind that anxiety was an ambition that this painting might hang in the Library of Congress or inspire a commission for a mural in the Massachusetts State House. But neither of those hopes panned out.

Pyle’s “Bunker Hill” is not a historically accurate portrayal of British battlefield tactics, as Don Hagist analyzed here. But as a history painting—an illustration of a semi-mythic story—it’s magnificent.

I’m struck by Pyle’s choice not to show any Americans, as other artists usually depicted this battle. Here, for example, is John Sloan’s picture of the provincials “At the Fence.” Even when Pyle had illustrated “Lord Percy’s Hunted Soldiers” a few years before, he put us beside a local militiaman. But in this picture the Americans are simply puffs of deadly musket fire at the top of the hill.

Those Sloan and earlier Pyle images are in the collection of the Delaware Art Museum, and Pyle’s “Bunker Hill” was there as well. No one knows where this canvas is now, and the F.B.I. would like to find out.