Clyde Osmer DeLand was a musician and writer as well as an illustrator. He studied music in Rochester, New York, and attended the University of Rochester. As a young man he taught music and was a concert pianist. However, DeLand decided to make art his career and came to Philadelphia to Drexel Institute, where he studied under Howard Pyle. In 1898 and 1899 he was one of the scholarship students who studied with Pyle at Chadds Ford during the summer.
He contributed illustrations from 1897 on to magazines including Harpers Monthly, Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal, and American Boy, specializing in scenes of American history. He illustrated many books, including White Aprons, by Maud Wilder Goodwin, 1897; Scouting for Washinston, by John Preston True, 1900; one volume of the complete writings of Hawthorne published by Houghton, Mifflin, 1900; Cinderella, by S.R. Crockett, 1901; and A Forest Hearth; A Romance of Indiana, by Charles Major, 1903.
