thumb|Signed drawing of Pennell by [[Manuel Rosenberg in 1924]]
Joseph Pennell (July 4, 1857 – April 23, 1926) was an American draftsman, etcher, lithographer, and illustrator for books and magazines. Pennell spent much of the time drawing, a skill not praised in his school. He received drawing lessons from James R. Lambdin.
In 1880, Pennell was involved in the violent expulsion of African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, a fellow student, from the academy. Tanner had suffered bullying at the academy since his entry earlier that year, which culminated when a group of students including Pennell seized Tanner and his easel and dragged them out onto Broad Street. The students tied Tanner to his easel in a mock-crucifixion, and left him struggling to free himself. Pennell apparently did not regret this action; many years later, when Tanner was already renowned in Europe and beginning to gain repute in the United States, Pennell recounted the attack as "The Advent of the Nigger," writing that there had never been "a great Negro or a great Jew artist."
Pennell was determined to work as an artist and opened his own studio in 1880, which he shared with a Henry Rankin Poore. Like his later mentor, James McNeill Whistler, he left America for London, England, on a commission to provide illustrations for The Century Magazine, and taught at Slade School of Art. He won a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle (1900), and 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. He taught also at the Art Students League of New York.
Joseph Pennell's Pictures of the Wonders of Work is a 1915 publication featuring 52 of Pennell's images, from around the world over three decades, with an introduction by the artist and detailed biographical work notes. It serves as an excellent and insightful summary of his career up to that point, and is freely available as an e-book; As is Pennell's 1925 The Adventures of an Illustrator:
Joseph Pennell made over 1800 prints, many for illustrations in magazines and books. Depicting first landmarks of his native Philadelphia, US, then travelling the globe recording the landscapes of South America, mainland Europe and industrial cities of his adopted English home. His distinction is as an etcher, lithographer, and illustrator, as well as a writer, lecturer and critic. As Mahonri Sharp Young writes:<blockquote>[Y]oung Pennell had a genius for not getting along with people yet was immediately successful in the fiercely competitive field of illustration. Hard working with remarkable ability and specific talent for drawing, he produced a tremendous volume of highly regarded work. He offended many, but knew everybody, including the most talented. and made sketches and watercolours of the Bethlehem Steel works, just north of his native Philadelphia.
In 1883, he was sent by Century to Italy, to work on illustrations for a series of articles by William Dean Howells. It was here Pennell created his 'first etching made in Europe' of The Ponte Vecchio, Florence, recalling in his 1925 book The Adventures of an Illustrator: <blockquote>I went to Italy to make my etchings and they were what I cared for. All day and every day I worked at them, drawing them straight on the plates, and that is why they and other proofs by etchers who draw from nature on the copper are reversed in printing. I even tried to bite them out of doors as I drew them – Hamerton' Philip Gilbert Hamerton – 'had recommended that – but only once, for I could not see and I swallowed the fumes of acid as I bent over the flat easel which held the bath, and then I upset that.. but the crowd enjoyed it, especially when the fumes ate the skin off my throat and I spat blood all about'</blockquote>That same year Pennell produced a series of evocative illustrations of heavy industry in Northern England, capturing Sheffield 'Steel City' as the world renowned centre of steel production, with all the shadowing heavy pollution that came with it. The Great Stack, Sheffield and the later dated The Big Chimney, Sheffield Pennel later commented; 'I may say that in 1883 I made a series of illustrations of work subjects in Sheffield which were printed in Harper's Magazine. Two things always impressed me in that townthe boiling water in the rivers and the abominable habits of the natives in the streets, who from across the rivers and behind walls and other safe places "'eave arf a brick" at you if you dare to draw.'
In 1887, Pennell began writing as Art Critic for The Star in London, a column originally started by George Bernard Shaw, but Pennell's outspokenness upset both the academy and other artists, and the editor asked Elizabeth Pennell to step in and contribute, launching her career writing art criticism. 1889 found Pennell in France, sketching 'The devils of Notre Dame' – stone gargoyles of the Paris Cathedral. One of these pen drawings was printed in the London Pall Mall Gazette It is quite possible that Pennell's visit inspired San Francisco printmakers Robert Harshe and Pedro Lemos, along with sculptor Ralph Stackpole and painter Gottardo Piazzoni, to found the California Society of Etchers in 1912, now the California Society of Printmakers.
That same year Pennell also traveled to Panama to create lithographs of the Panama Canal, which was still under construction. Steam Shovel in the Cut at Bas Obispo From the Tops of the Furnaces.
While sketching a Leeds munitions factory, Pennell recalled encountering a hostile crowd and having to escape with help from the local police. He reflected; "Why does war make people so idiotic, why do people fear an artist more than an enemy. Art is powerful and the people hate it. They feel it is above them and they hate it all the worse". Pennell also reiterated his belief that 'natives in that part of England' like to 'eave 'arf a brick at the furiner', and the foreigner is anyone they do not know' Pennell later wrote in Adventures of an Illustrator; <blockquote>I had had my sight of War and felt and knew the wreck and ruin of War, the wreck of my life and my home-and that has never left me since. The Transports 1917 He also produced official posters for the Division of Pictorial Publicity, formed to aid the US war effort – That Liberty Shall not Perish.. 1917. Provide the Sinews of War Buy Liberty Bonds, 1918.
Pennell commented on the relationship of government to the arts at the time; "When the United States wished to make public its wants, whether of men or money, it found that art–as the European countries had found – was the best medium."
Return to America and final years
Pennell returned to England, from the aborted 1916 French war assignment, then onto America with wife Elizabeth, where he was authorised by the U.S. Government to make records of their war effort, similar to as he had undertaken in England; In The Dry Dock, 1917 Pennell was working as a teacher at the Art Students League up until a week before his death. Among his students was Frances Farrand Dodge. He contracted influenza, which developed into pneumonia, and died at home in the Hotel Margaret, Brooklyn Heights on April 23, 1926.
In his 1951 biography of the Pennells, Edward Larocque Tinker stated that:"<blockquote>[J]ust before he (Pennell) died he begged to be carried to his window for one last look at the view of Manhattan that he loved and had often sketched and painted. The doctor thought it unwise, but I have always regretted that Mr. Pennell was deprived of this last pleasure. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, while professing to be neither a Jew hater or Jew lover, the portrait he portrays is "extremely unflattering" and the book is part of the museum's Katz Ehrenthal Collection of antisemitic artifacts and visual materials.
Mount Pennell in Utah was named after him.
Little Wakefield
In 1880, Pennell created Little Wakefield, an etching of the Little Wakefield estate. The building is a home located on what is now South Campus of La Salle University, and is currently called St. Mutiens Hall. This estate was built by Thomas Fisher in 1829 and was occupied by his families for generations; now it is the residence of the Christian Brothers of the university. The etching depicts the house lived in by the second generation of Fishers. During World War I it was used as demonstration center for a local branch of the National League of Women's Service. Little Wakefield was also the location where Thomas R. Fisher ran the first knitting factory in America.
Personal life
Pennell married Elizabeth Robins, a writer and fellow Philadelphian, on June 4, 1884. 'A marriage of equals and complements, bringing together two talented individuals with keen minds, ambition, and a love of work.' They had a mutual agreement to not let their marriage interfere with their work. As Elizabeth Robins Pennell later wrote:<blockquote>After Canterbury [the publication of their first book, A Canterbury Pilgrimage in 1885] the opportunity came to test the resolution reached before our marriage, not to allow anything to interfere with his drawing and my writing. Should they call us in different directions, each must go his or her way.