Sachi Yanari-Rizzo, Curator of Prints & Drawings
A champion of original printmaking popularized during the 19th century etching revival, Joseph Pennell worked to elevate and foster the respect for the medium in the early 20th century. He authored numerous books on printmaking, helped found the Philadelphia Society of Etchers in 1880, and taught at the Art Students League. He created over 900 etchings and mezzotints and more than 600 lithographs. The FWMoA owns twelve etchings and lithographs by the artist.
Born in Philadelphia, Pennell attended the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Design where he likely became acquainted with fellow student, Gerome Ferris. In 1879, Ferris’ father, Stephen, gave Pennell his first lessons in etching in his studio and an introduction to his personal print collection. After Pennell studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he set up a studio to work as an illustrator.
In 1884 Century Magazine assigned Pennell to an extended project involving drawings throughout England, Italy, and France. For thirty years London was home to the artist and his wife, Elizabeth Robins. Pennell’s work was influenced by expatriate, James Abbott McNeil Whistler, who was also living in London. Pennell and Elizabeth became friends with him and published his biography. Whistler, who was an avid printmaker, even asked Pennell for assistance in printing a series of etchings in 1893.
The two artists shared an appreciation for urban settings and architecture as subjects. This is seen in the FWMoA’s Hyde Park Mansions (1906) and Whistler’s Temple Bar (1877). Both prints utilize perspective to structure a similar composition. The horse drawn carriages are summarily rendered with a light descriptive line, and the people are merely anonymous shadows.
Like Whistler and their other contemporaries, Pennell experimented with grounds, acids, different types of ink and paper, and used plate tone (a thin layer of ink left on the plate) for atmospheric effects. He enlisted a dentist to help refine his tools for etching. Pennell enjoyed drawing directly on prepared copper plates on site, rather than sketching on paper, and often completed them within a day.
Pennell’s prints bridge the 19th and 20th centuries. He drew from past American art and European contemporaries to develop a way of describing new modern bridges, factories, high-rise buildings, and machinery. InTrains that Come and Go Pennell focused on the architectural framework that towers upwards, like the vaults in a cathedral. This fascination with architectural engineering is shared in a study for The Great Gantry Charing Cross Station by British printmaker Muirhead Bone, whose work Pennell admired. Pennell’s fine, etched line quality is reminiscent of prints by American impressionist artists, like Childe Hassam. The steam billows, replacing fog and mist in epic American landscape paintings. He and other artists at this time used titles that drew comparisons between cityscapes and natural wonders, like canyons and cliffs.
In 1903, Pennell created an etching of Queen Anne’s Mansions, built in the 1870s. It was the tallest building in London at 10 stories. Manhattan’s skyrise boom boasted 66 buildings by the end of 1902 that ranged from nine to 25 stories tall. Pennell had not spent a great deal of time in the U.S. in 20 years. His experience visiting New York in 1904 and 1908 must have been awe inspiring, seeing the dramatic changes to the lower Manhattan skyline.
In The ”L” and Trinity Building (1904), Pennell captured New York City in transition by contrasting the old and the new. The “L”, or elevated train, races by, perhaps alluding to the speed of change. Dominating the composition is the metal skeletal frame of the Trinity Building. The skyscraper under construction is plain in its geometric form, due to its cage construction. Peeking from behind it is the diminutive Trinity Church, built in 1698 and rebuilt in 1846 in the more ornate Gothic Revival style. Although only faintly apparent, the Trinity Building’s architect Francis Hatch Kimball considered its placement next to the historic church and incorporated Gothic elements into the design, seen in the pointed-arched window.
The artist’s sense of wonder is expressed in The Unbelievable City (1908) with a panoramic, majestic view of the city approximating that seen by a transatlantic ship passenger arriving in New York Harbor. The buildings are simplified to their inherent geometry, bleached by the sun with little detailing, save for some hints of windows, emphasizing the flatness of the facades.
The Pennells settled in Brooklyn in 1921. The artist was impressed with the magnitude of labor and scale of the buildings. As skyscrapers became emblematic of America, Pennell’s prints were also an expression of national pride in the country’s ingenuity, hard work, and technological progress. Pennell stated, “In the morning the mountains of buildings hide themselves, to reveal themselves in the rosy steam clouds that chase each other across their flanks; when evening fades, they are mighty cliffs glimmering with glistening lights in the magic and mystery of the night.”i ”The Unbelievable City, the city that has been built since I grew up, the city beautiful, built by men I know, built for people I know. The city that inspires me, that I love. And all America is like this and—all—or nearly all unseen, unknown, untouched.”ii
The title of Pennell’s etching Caissons on Vesey Street (New York) from 1924 suggests the focus of the composition is the caissons. Caissons were cylindrical in shape and filled with concrete. They were sunk deep to bedrock and formed the stable foundation necessary for the skyscrapers. At street level, the caissons are in the foreground in preparation for the building of the New York Telephone Company’s building (Barclay-Vesey Building) that was completed in 1926. Plumes of smoke and angular lines of the cranes convey energy in the building activity.
However, even more important in the composition is the five-and-dime monumental corporate headquarters, the Woolworth Building. At 57 stories, it was the world’s tallest building until it was surpassed in 1930. Central in the background of this print by Pennell, it was also immortalized by other artists such as John Marin. Like a Gothic cathedral, the pointed gabled forms create an upwards visual movement as it emerges out of the clouds of smoke and dust.
In 1924, the same year as Pennell’s print, a New York Times Magazine writer exclaimed: “Mr. Pennell is etching a series of New York plates that show just this captivating moment between the naked beginnings of vast architectural enterprises and the comparatively dull finishings; the interesting moment when everything is alive and thrilling, full of movement and promises.”iii
In 1912, Pennell asked to document the latter part of the Panama Canal’s construction for the magazines The Century and The Illustrated London News. Vital to international trade, the Panama Canal was a monumental 10-year project (1904-1914) that connected the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Pennell created lithographs from his drawings back in Philadelphia. The FWMoA owns seven prints from this series, which records Pennell’s impressions of the construction as well as the neighboring areas.
Pennell first experimented with lithography briefly in the 1870s. He and Elizabeth published Lithography and Lithographers in London and New York in 1898. In lithography Pennell could capture the vigorous, spontaneous line quality of his sketches as well as suggest mass. In Bottom of Gatun Lock (1912) the lock’s gates extend the height of the paper, communicating their enormity, reinforced by the minute silhouettes of the workers on the scaffolding. He wrote, “So huge are the locks—the three, I think, a mile long, each one thousand feet between the gates, and about ninety feet deep—that, until the men knock off, there scarce seems anyone around.”iv
Make an appointment or stop by the Print & Drawing Study Center, Tuesday-Friday, 11am-3pm to see more of our works on paper!