Howard Pyle
“The Father of American Illustration”
True or false: We know what pirates from the “Golden Age of Piracy” (roughly 1690–1730) really looked like.
The answer is false.
I hate to shiver your timbers, but what you know about Blackbeard’s buccaneering breeches is a lie. Well, not a lie exactly. What we imagine when we imagine a pirate is a combination of an illustrator’s fondness of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the importance he placed on depicting historical events from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries with a mix of reverence and panache, a dash of Romani “gypsy” culture, and a sizable figment of said illustrator’s imagination.
“He created something out of mixing something from history,” said historian and illustrator, David Rickman, “and made something very seductive. So seductive that no pirate ever wore anything differently.”
Of course, the illustrator to which I am referring is one of the greatest—some would argue the greatest—of all time: Howard Pyle.
