Eric
Pape, the Master of the Pageant, was born in San Francisco, California,
October I 17th 1870.
Pape was quite the prolific prodigy. He studied at the San Francisco School of Design, but left for Paris in 1888, while still in his teens. He spent a couple years in Paris studying at many of the best schools. He studied under Boulanger, Lefebvre, Constant, Doucet Blanc, Delance, Laurens and Gerome. [We can take all of this two ways: either he was a quick learner and he was going from instructor to instructor in search of knowledge; or he was unfocused and flitted from ecole to ecole. My guess is the former, as his prolific output during his early years is staggering.] Of the five years he spent in Europe, one was "on location" in northern Germany where he found and painted the subjects for his first Salon entries (1890), and two were in Egypt. Records show that he exhibited ten paintings in Cairo in 1891, four at the Paris Salon of 1892, two Egyptian pieces at the World's Columbian Exposition and eight works at the Paris Salon - both in 1893, the year he returned to America.
He
married Alice Monroe in 1894. (I guessed 1896 below.) In 1897 he seems to
have returned to Europe where he exhibited by special invitation at the
International Kunst Austellung in Munich. That same year he submitted
sixteen (16!) pictures to the Salon at the Champs de Mars and had ALL
16 accepted by the jury. He was asked to choose eight to be
displayed as there wasn't room for all 16. Read the Pageant
biography for more information on his prodigious output.
In 1898, at the ripe old age of 28, he
founded the Eric Pape School of Art in Boston. N.C. Wyeth was an
early pupil for a short time and even considered teaching
there in 1909. I don't know how long the school lasted, nor, for that
matter, does the
information Mr. Collidge sent address the Frederic/Eric question (see
original page right).
Below is a sample of one of his 1904 paintings, also courtesy of Warren Collidge. It's from a very nice signed print he sent me.
In
1906, Pape was instrumental in rescuing the Constitution ("Old Ironsides")
from certain destruction. In the space of three weeks he circulated a
petition to save the historic ship and the 170 foot long document with over
30,000 signatures was presented to the Congress of the United States. It was
instrumental in convincing Congress to fund restoration.
The list of books he illustrated is also greatly expanded due to the information Warren provided. See the Gloucester Pageant article for even more, but to those named below, we can add:
- The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (1895)
- Hilda Stafford (1895)
- The Children of the Sun (1897)
- The Life of Mahomet (1899)
- The Great North Road (1899)
- The War of the Air (1908)
- Memoirs of Ellen Terry (1908)
Another
great Pape illustrated book is his Notre Dame de Paris, of 1928. I
don't know how I could have omitted it the first time around, but I want to
rectify it right now. Illustrated in color and b&w, the 'List of
Illustrations' is four pages long! At right is a sample of the line work. It
was issued in a signed and numbered deluxe edition, too. Not a common
occurance in 1928!
Thanks again to Warren Coolidge for all the data. It was fun spinning together a bunch of observations into a biography, but it's much better to present the facts.
More samples of Warren Coolidge's generosity below.
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Sooner or later I was bound to stick my neck way out on one of these pages. Here I go.
I can't find out much about Eric Pape. I've got a birth year of 1870 and he is supposed to have lived until 1938. His biography is conspicuously absent from all my reference books and my personal collection raises as many questions as it answers. So I intend to make this an exploratory page, posing questions and ideas as well as sharing with you some of Pape's excellent art.
My
main theory: Eric Pape and "Frederick S.M. Pape" are the same person.
At
left is an illustration from the February 1893 issue of The Century
Magazine. It's the earliest work I've seen by "Frederick S.M. Pape" and
has the overworked look
of a young artist trying to impress. The signature
is obscured in the lower right corner by a wealth of slashing pen work, but
I've tried to clean it up enough so that we can observe the general
penmanship (see right). The work is dated "Paris '92" below the name. This
signature led me to Lois Marie Fink's excellent American Art at the
Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons.
This
is "real-time research" folks. Sure enough, though his name does not appear
in the book's index, Frederic Pape is among the one thousand American
artists listed in the appendix of those who submitted and exhibited at the
Paris Salon from 1890 to 1899. I've just learned that he was born in San
Francisco and was an exhibitor at the Societie Nationale des Beaux-Arts at
its inception in 1890 and from 1892 through 1894. His work included
paintings, sculpture and drawings. Significantly, most of his 1894
submissions were drawings with an Inca theme. Also in 1894, "Frederick S.M.
Pape" signs his last Century drawing on page 888 of the April issue.
In
August of 1894, "Eric Pape" can be found, fully developed on page 532 of
Century magazine. Along with the new name is a new signature that seems
to vary with each drawing for several months. At right is the closest to
Frederick's signature, but it's obvious to me that though he was making
every attempt to reinvent his name, his art was giving him away. By 1923,
however, the signature had taken on many of the original elements, as seen
at the top of this page.
From 1894 to 1898, Pape was a regular artist at The Century. He occasionally worked for other magazines of the day, including Cosmopolitan (1896) and Scribner's (1894). I've found his work at McClures in 1908, too. It's not clear that he had returned to The States to do the early work. Some of the illustrations in the 1897 poetry book, Echoes, that he illustrated were dated "96 Paris" so it's likely that he either stayed in Europe after leaving the French Acadamie. Or, he says jumping up and down with excitement, perhaps he returned for a honeymoon! A small notice in the Echoes Table of Contents informs me that "Initial Letters Designed by Alice Pape." If nothing else, I'm assuming that he was married by 1896 and that some of his magazine and book work was executed abroad.
Throughout his career, his
mastery of the pen was a common thread. He was an excellent painter and his
use of color was often classified as Impressionistic, but it was the ink
drawings that attracted me to his art and kept me looking for more.
I called attention to the "Inca" theme of his last Paris exhibition because his most enduring work was done for The Fair God, Lew Wallace's novel of Cortes and his conquest of the Aztecs and Mexico.
The two-volume 1899 edition
contains upwards of 30 photogravure plates of a quality similar to the one
above. There are more than twice that number of chapters, each with its own
two-color head piece, initial and tail piece in pen and ink. Each was
derived from an Aztec symbol or object and each was as beautiful as the
sample right. This abundance of vignettes and attention to detail was to be
a hallmark of Pape's book illustration.
I think that The Arabian Nights - Tales of Wonder and Magnificence is my favorite of Pape's works. Done in 1923, the ornateness of the plates and the confidence displayed in the designs makes this one to pore over again and again. Especially wonderful are his title illustrations for each story, with hand-lettered headings and intricate and clever designs. Scattered throughout are small vignettes based on Arabian motifs, all of which are listed in the seven-page List of Illustrations. The stipple work in this book could easily have influenced Virgil Finlay!
Information supplied by: http://www.bpib.com/illustrat/pape.htm