When coal-laden barges and fiery steel furnaces dominated Pittsburgh’s riverfronts and waterways, Thornton Oakley captured them in 30 black-and-white drawings sketched on a visit here in July 1913.

Six months later, the Pittsburgh native exhibited his work at a Downtown gallery and described his approach this way to the Pittsburgh Dispatch:

“Artists before now have thought it necessary to ascend in a balloon, or look down upon the mills or city from the tops of skyscrapers. But the spirit of modern life, of steel and steam, and the vast creations of man today is found not by looking at industry through the eye of a bird, but through the eye of man.” 

Six of Oakley’s drawings from Wunderly’s gallery show are on exhibit through March 22 at the Heinz History Center in the Strip District. Anne Madarasz, museum division director, would love to find more of these Pittsburgh drawings that Mr. Oakley divided into categories: “The Mills,” “The River,” “The City” and “The Railroad.’’

“It’s a blend of illustration and realistically trying to convey a scene. You see his training as an architect but you also see his manipulation of smoke and light to create layers of things he reveals and hides within the work,” she said.

Mr. Oakley’s drawings are more sharply focused than the softer, impressionistic paintings of industrial Pittsburgh done by Aaron Gorson between 1903 and 1921. One likely reason for that stylistic difference is that Mr. Oakley had studied art in Delaware with realist Howard Pyle, considered one of the fathers of American magazine illustration. Mr. Oakley went on to illustrate for Harper’s and other well-known magazines.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1881, the artist was the son of John Milton Oakley, a stockbroker, and his wife, Imogen Brashear Oakley. By age 12, Thornton Oakley had fallen hard for trains and built models of them with his friends. He described his fascination with the trains that ran near his East End neighborhood in a 1948 essay (see below) for the Western Pennsylvania Historical Society’s magazine.

“Here it was, I feel certain, that I first experienced my enrapturement by manifestations of man's genius, here where I sprawled upon the brink of the wall of rock, my head projecting over the abyss down which I gazed upon the passing engines,” he wrote.

After graduating from Shady Side Academy in 1897, the artist earned architecture degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in 1901 and 1902. In 1910, he married Amy Ewing, a travel writer. The couple traveled extensively during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Mrs. Oakley wrote travel guides for which her husband drew illustrations. Titles included “Hill Towns of the Pyrenees,” “The Cloud Lands of France,” “Kaleidoscope Quebec” and “Behold the West Indies.”

Mrs. Oakley also wrote “Our Pennsylvania: Keys to the Keystone State.” Published in 1950, it required a visit to Pittsburgh. Mrs. Oakley described it this way:

“Invitations poured in: to cordial Homer Saint-Gaudens’ refectory table, where talk flowed freely, beginning with tales of the host’s father, the sculptor August Saint-Gaudens, and continuing to the latest ultra-ultra doings at the Carnegie International Exhibition; to the exquisite house of “Colly” Burgwin, whose ancestors’ portraits look down, with evident approval, on their congenial grouping by the banker’s decorator wife — descendant of Charles Willson Peale; to a dish of discourse at that hospitable lawyer Southard Hay’s. There were no dull evenings in Pittsburgh.”

Originally, the history center received six of the Oakley drawings as gifts from the artist. But when the museum’s staff began cataloging its collection in the 1980s, two of the six were missing, Ms. Madarasz said.

During World War II, Mr. Oakley drew an entire series of images of the war effort for National Geographic magazine. He also painted murals for the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

Marylynne Pitz: mpitz@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1648.

First Published: January 14, 2015, 5:00 a.m.