Peixotto described one sketching trip they made together:
“Mr. Pyle and I were both engaged upon illustrations for the same book and this was a bond between us which soon ripened into a good friendship. In his buggy he used to stop for me at the inn, and we went sketching together up the valley of the Brandywine or over the hill toward Birmingham Meeting House. Those were delightful afternoons and the memory of them lingers as a precious reminiscence for he was an exceptional man.”
Peixotto even mentions Pyle’s class of students from Drexel at Chadds Food; though he does not mention studying with Pyle, Peixotto may have attended Pyle’s lectures. In a conversation with Richard Lykes, Anna Whalen Batts remembered that Peixotto was too “set” to learn anythin new from Pyle. After all, Peixotto was an accomplished artist who had studied in Paris in the late 1880s, won awards at the World’s Colombian Exhibition in 1893 and at the Paris Salon in 1895, and contributed drawings to the “little magazine” The Lark (Published in San Francisco in 1895). By 1900 he was regularly contributing drawings of architectural subjects to Harper’s Monthly, Scribner’s and other publications. He wrote and illustrated a series of books about his travels to Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and various parts of the United States.
In 1911 Peixotto painted his first mural, La Morte d’ Arthur, for the Public Library in Cleveland. During the First World War he served in France as one of eight artists attached to the Allied Expeditionary Force and became a specialist on camouflage for war defense. In 1919 he returned to New York and served as director of the department of mural painting at the Beaux Arts institute of Design from 1935 to 1940, he became a strong supporter of the WPA Federal ARt Project and advocated the use of mural decoration for public buildings in New York. He also served as a consultant on murals for the New York World’s Fair in 1939.
