His ancestors were Quaker settlers from England who in the eighteenth century had come seeking religious freedom and a new life farming in the Brandywine Valley.
Pyle grew up in a fieldstone farmhouse now known as Goodstay. When his father's business fell on hard times, the family moved to a smaller dwelling in the city. He studied at the Friends School and later at T. Clarkson Taylor's Scientific and Commercial Academy in Wilmington. Though birthright Quakers, the Pyle family joined the Swedenborgian church in Wilmington in 1866. Pyle's younger sister Katharine (1863-1938) became an artist and writer of children's books.
Pyle's mother observed his artistic talents and encouraged him to draw at a young age. He read German and English folktales, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), novels by Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, and illustrated English periodicals--Punch, Illustrated London News, Once a Week, and the Churchman's Family Magazine. He became familiar with drawings by the English artists Arthur Boyd Houghton, Charles Keene, John Leech, and the Pre-Raphaelites.
In 1869 Pyle studied art in Philadelphia with Adolph van der Wielen, a Belgian painter who established an art school that existed only a few years.
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