Joseph Pennell
Joseph Pennell
ca. 1860 - 1926
American illustrator, printmaker and writer. Born into a Quaker family, he showed an early aptitude for drawing. Against his father’s wishes he attended evening classes at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art and later entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Always outspoken and independent, he clashed with teachers in both places and never graduated. In 1880 he opened his own studio and undertook commissions for commercial illustration.
Pennell’s first published work appeared in Scribner’s Monthly in July 1881, and his drawings of American cities were soon to be found in many illustrated journals and books. In 1883 he was commissioned by the Century magazine to illustrate articles by William Dean Howells on Tuscan cities, and a year later, having married the writer Elizabeth Robins, he took up residence in London. In England he became part of a circle that included many of the best-known literary and artistic figures of the day, among them Robert Louis Stevenson, George Bernard Shaw and James McNeill Whistler.
Pennell had early tried his hand at etching, and this aspect of his work assumed considerable importance in England. Following the example of such French lithographers as Toulouse-Lautrec, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen and Odilon Redon, and of his friend Whistler, Pennell went on to master the technique of lithography, and in 1898 he published Lithography and Lithographers. He continued to furnish illustrations for American publications, but from the mid-1880s he was also much in demand as a writer.
Pennell’s work owes much to the Spanish etchers and painters he admired as a student and to the style of draughtsmanship perfected by Whistler and his circle. A master of the descriptive line and the dramatically composed landscape, he liked to oppose the beauties of nature and the works of man, and in his drawings and etchings of London or New York the powerful buildings are seen in conjunction with majestic formations of clouds, with the river or the park, for example in the etching of the Tower of London (1904; see Wuerth, 1928, no. 294).
Pennell’s relationship with Whistler was almost that of disciple to master. Both men were remarkable for their personal combativeness and their deeply held convictions. Pennell’s wife Elizabeth wrote in The Art of Whistler (New York, 1928) that Whistler was ‘a wit and warrior in the defense of art’, and both Pennells were determined to accord him the place in history they believed he deserved. Whistler was flattered by their attention and cooperated by sharing his views in long conversations and by providing abundant material on his life and career for their biography (published in 1908 after a legal battle with Whistler’s sister-in-law and executor, Rosalind Birnie Philip, who resented their inflexibility and possessiveness). The Whistler Journal (1921) was a personal account of the Pennells’ association with their hero.
After travelling widely between 1913 and 1917 (including visits to World War I battle sites), Pennell moved back to New York, where he painted notable watercolours of the burgeoning Manhattan skyline and began to teach and lecture on etching and illustration. The Pennells mounted an exhibition of Whistleriana at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, ultimately leaving their collections to the Library and endowing a fund for the increase of the national print collections. [Alan M. Fern. "Pennell, Joseph." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 10, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T066188.]
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