Joseph Pennell: New York, New York!

"New York Bay from the Margaret" by Joseph Pennell
Pastel on Brown Paper

"On June Twentieth, 1908, Joseph Pennell sailed for New York. While he was there, the Grolier Club proposed to give a show of his etchings with one hundred and fifty-seven prints in all, a proposal which he did not consider twice before accepting. Another show of his work was opened at Keppels'. He was also making illustrations of New York with coloured chalks on brown paper, his knowledge of New York growing with each drawing. These would be used in an upcoming book.

At the end of October I joined him, my first visit to my native land in twenty-four years. He was at the Belmont. 'People ask me why I go to the Belmont,' he wrote in the 1919 Keppel Catalogue. 'I go to get things like this ('The Clock, Grand Central') and from every room on every side I get subjects just as inspiring.' It was well that work no longer monopolized all his time. 

"The Clock, Grand Central" by Joseph Pennell

November was a month of dinners, lunches, visits, committee meetings. And he was my guide, on foot to lower New York and its skyscrapers, on ferryboats to the waterfront and its glories. And we were still in New York when 'The Life of Whistler' was published. If it cost us much time, labour and grave anxiety, we were repaid. It was an immediate success, both in England and America. Landing at Southampton on the morning of December third, in the first paper we opened we found an advertisement announcing the second edition.

That same winter McLure Hamilton painted him, in his long grey blouse, sitting in his studio by his table littered with bottles of acid, copper plates, and baths, a misty glimpse of St. Paul's through the window beyond. A.S. Hartrick made a lithograph of him in the same blouse, turning the wheel of his press. He sat to J. Kerr-Lawson for a second lithograph, to Clifford Addams for a second painting. William Strang's tinted drawing of him was made some few years before. These and Whistler's portraits, the lithographs, were on our walls. A professional beauty could be in no greater demand as a sitter, his friends used to tell him."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The LIfe and Letters of Joseph Pennell, Vol. Two" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)