Joseph Pennell: Introducing Elizabeth Robins

Sketch of Elizabeth Robins Pennell
by Joseph Pennell

"'Scribner's' could not have enough of the new artist, Joseph Pennell, on its staff. Commissions tumbled over each other. But one commission of 1881 I cannot dismiss as lightly because of its influence in shaping Joseph Pennell's life and mine, though at the time we had never as much as heard of each other.

On May 3, 1881, Drake wrote: 'Will you please send me, say - eight of your very best etchings of old Historical Buildings about Philadelphia with notes of description. It is possible that a short article on them may be worked up for 'Scribner's. These were accepted and a writer sought to work up the story. My uncle Charles Leland was asked, but too busy at the time, he proposed me. My first appearance in print had been in the 'Atlantic' a few months before. They agreed and my uncle and I made an appointment to meet Pennell. 

After all these years, I still wonder which amazed me most, the artist or the studio. I knew no artists, had never been inside a studio. I am not sure what I expected but I fancy something Oidaesque. We read Ouida in those remote days, also newspaper stories of princely British and French painters working in palatial studios. What I found was a large bare room, a dusty floor without carpet, a high ceiling, a large uncurtained window. The chairs were few and either broken or littered up with odds and ends. 

The artist waiting for us was young, tall, exceedingly thin, with brown hair, brown moustache and shortish brown beard, deep-set grey-green eyes, intent and serious beyond his years, holding one's attention at once. I remember thinking him a strange combination of shyness and self-possession. He was shy in meeting Leland whose reputation as a writer was greater than it is now and who looked the prophet. And the youth who was 'afraid of girls' may have found me terrifying. But when our preliminary talk brought us to the proposed article, Pennell's shyness vanished. 

Wholly self-reliant where his art was concerned, he stood in fear of neither man nor woman. And as he talked he fired one with the flame of his enthusiasm. Even Leland, who preferred to hold the floor himself, could not resist, was forced into silence... Before we left the studio Pennell arranged to give me a list of his subjects or better, to show them to me so as the more lucidly to explain them and the impression he wished to convey in his prints, and we started on our walks within the next few days."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

Joseph Pennell: Illustrator

"At the Sign of the Plow"
by Joseph Pennell

"If Joseph Pennell did not grow famous over night, he came very near it. In less than two years after his reckless shaking of business from off his feet, his drawings were appearing in 'Scribner's Magazine' and, sure sign of success in the eyes of his family, he was making a good income.

He deserved to succeed. His crowning pleasure never ceased to be work. With that nothing could interfere. He never wavered in his determination to become an illustrator nor in his belief in his own ability. He had the advantage of being at the dawn of 'The Golden Age of Illustration in America.' Artists were appearing among the illustrators of the younger generation - Abbey, Pyle, Rogers, Reinhart in 'Harper's.' Farney, Blum, Brennan, Lungren in 'Scribner's.' Joseph Pennell, his portfolio under his arm, began his siege of the publishers' offices. 

It was largely to chance he owed his first commission. F.D. Stone, librarian of the Pennsylvania Historical Society, had for a few years been the Pennells' neighbour. He was a fairly keen collector of prints and in his house the boy had spent many evenings poring over his portfolios. Among Stone's other visitors was Townsend Ward, who was adding a record of Germantown Road for the Pennsylvania Historical Society's 'Magazine of History and Biography. He asked Pennell to illustrate the articles. The result was Pennell's first series of etchings, small plates of places he either knew or could copy from old prints. In all the rendering was sincere, the picturesqueness of his subjects was expressed picturesquely, and already he revealed his never-failing sense of the right point of view. 

Before the plates were all bitten, he was planning, scheming, besieging editors. He ran to fires. He wrote and illustrated accounts of cycling tours, he suggested the illustration of Edgar Allen Poe's works, and explored a marshy stretch of ground in South Philadelphia called 'The Mash' and induced a writer he knew to outline the text of an article which he then submitted to 'Scribner's' with his work. The drawings were liked and Pennell was sent home to finish the series. When Pennell made his second journey to New York, it was with finished drawings. They were accepted and paid for on the spot. They were even sent to the next exhibition of the Salmagundi Club. The supreme moment was when he went straight to his mother's room, took his pay out of his pocket and threw it, note by note, on her bed. It was his vindication - and after this, work streamed in of itself."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

 

 

Joseph Pennell: A Life-long Regret

"The 'L' and Trinity Building"
by Joseph Pennell

Joseph Pennell was not entirely happy at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art. "He objected to some of the teachers as 'too much mechanical and too little industrial art,' and stayed away from their classes. His fellow students began to follow suit, he was unwittingly inciting rebellion, and when the secretary wrote asking an excuse for his non-attendance, he neglected to answer. After a reasonable interval a second letter from the secretary informed him that 'his name was stricken from the roll of scholars.' 

One of the staff promptly induced the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to look again at Pennell's drawings. This time he was not rejected, and at last convinced that selling coal was a sheer waste of his talent, he threw business to the winds and settled down to hard work in the Academy School. Hardly had he left the office, as if in justification of his new adventure, he received his first serious commission - and then another, and another! Great was the amazement of Pennell's family and friends to find that he could earn more from art in two days than in two weeks from business. 

At the Academy he started in the night Antique Class, which was in charge of the type of master who dispenses criticism with a sneer. For Pennell, ultra-sensitive, a sneer was no stimulant. He shrank from it, escaped by absenting himself from the classroom at the hour of the master's visit, and as his time was at last entirely his own, joined the day Antique Class under one of the best professors who ever taught at the Academy. 

Thomas Eakins was interested in him and soon promoted him to Life Class. Eakins did not sneer but he could be brutal. Pennell was determined to work in his own way for the end he had set himself. He did the unheard of and drew the model on a large scale in pen and ink. Eakins was indignant, would not stand that sort of originality and said so brutally. The student once more dispensed with the master's criticism. He gave Eakins no chance to be brutal again, a mistake he regretted as the years went on. 

His months of study taught him at least that art knows no short cut, that technique cannot be mastered save by diligent application, and it was good for him just to breathe the atmosphere of the Academy, to make friends with artists, to talk of the things he cared for with those who also cared. Pennell got out of the Academy not all it might have given had he been less sensitive, but enough to repay him, even if he did deprive himself of the criticism supposed to be the chief advantage of study in an art school. When commissions quickly multiplied for the work it was his ambition to do, he left the Academy and took a studio, sharing it with his friend Harry Poore, and having for neighbours Cecilia Beaux and Stephen Parrish. By the end of 1880 he was well launched.

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters fo Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

Joseph Pennell: Influencers

"The Bridge Across Market Street from 
Broad Street Station" by Joseph Pennell

"Joseph Pennell made friends among the students at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art, the friendship lasting through life with H.F. Stratton, in his turn a master at the school, and G. Dinsmore Gideon, who exchanged art for publishing. They and other students, who were in earnest, formed a class within the class, wandered all over town in search of subjects to sketch, with Pennell the coal clerk somehow managing to get days off to go along. On Sunday, they would have a model or carry their sketchbooks down by the river. They drew illustrations, one of the group suggesting the subject each week. 

Mr. Stratton remembers that Pennell's first etching, on glass, of 'Dingman's Ferry' was shown at the Academy, the year 1879. It was banished to the top line. 'Never mind,' said Pennell, 'my things will be hung lower next year.' 'And,' Mr. Stratton adds, 'they were.'

About this period it was Pennell's good fortune to run across young Gerome Ferris, through whom he got to know Stephen Ferris the father, an important factor in Pennell's development. Ferris helped to found the New York Etching Club and the Philadelphia Society of Etchers. He was an accomplished technician, and always willing to admit intelligent students into the studio and let them watch him at work. It was he who inspired Pennell to substitute copper for glass, and he was also responsible for the first phase of Pennell's style as illustrator. 

Ferris had discovered modern Spanish art, been thrilled by the discovery, owned Fortuny etchings and reproductions of Rico, Casanova, and Fabrès. It was a pleasure to show prints to so responsive a youth and to take him to see the paintings by Fortuny and Rico in the Gibson and Johnson collections. Through Ferris, the Spanish was the strongest influence revealed not merely in Pennell's early drawings by in American illustration at its best. Blum, Brennan and Lungren, who had studied in the Pennsylvania Academy, also met Ferris, were invited to his studio, and profited by their visits."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

 

Joseph Pennell: If At First...

"Rainy Night, Charing Cross Shops"
by Joseph Pennell

"Joseph Pennell's goal was admission into the Pennsylvania Academy School. Tuition there was free, and it was probably as good as any other in the country. For the country, having no art, naturally had no art schools of the least pretension. Students went abroad for their training. William Morris Hunt and John La Farge studied in Paris. In the spring of the Centennial year, a landmark in the history of American art, William Merritt Chase, Frank Duveneck, John Twachtman, McLure Hamilton, and Henry Muhrman, back from Munich and Antwerp schools, exhibited in the Pennsylvania Academy: the first group of American artists, though foreign-trained, to lay the foundation of whatever we have in the way of American art today.

Pennell submitted his summer's work and after months of waiting was requested to send for it. He was rejected, and again when he tried his luck at the first exhibition in the Academy's new building. He could not live indefinitely on his parents, who, if they said nothing, he knew were ashamed of having to keep a grown-up son. Various schemes were suggested. Nothing offered itself except a clerkship in the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company's office and, despairing, he accepted it and settled down to his distasteful duties as clerk.

He was conscientious, and did it to the best of his ability. He gave his employers a fair return for his salary - seven dollars a week to start with - and refused to allow the office to exhaust his energy or stifle his ambition. To the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art, an outcome of the Centennial, he submitted the pen and chalk drawings, the studies of casts and marines rejected by the Academy. The new school saw something in them. He was entered as a student. And now, he said, his life began. The only classes he could attend were in the evening. From seven in the morning until six in the afternoon, he was at his clerk's desk. At six he rushed home, bolted his supper, and was off to the school in an old tumbled-down building at Broad and Race Streets.  

Pennell never had any use for 'genius work,' as it is known in the studios. He believed in the genius of industry. Like all artists who have succeeded, he worked unceasingly. In the office when business was slack, the foreman, with a curious likeness to Lincoln, would pose for him. He sketched everything in sight, usually on brown paper in black and white. After work he etched on glass. He drew his beautiful old Great-aunt Beulah and the other aunts in their Quaker dress. On vacation with the entire day at his disposal, his work was his recreation."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

Joseph Pennell: Determined

"Broad Street, Philadelphia" by Joseph Pennell

"The third of Joseph's Pennell's drawing teachers at school was Joseph Ropes, long since forgotten. He was original neither in his teaching nor in his work which was mannered, a fact he apparently realized. He had written to one pupil on the need of close contact with Nature to save the artist from mannerisms, but he kept on falling into them himself, and they were inevitably appropriated by the pupil. Ropes sole recommendation was his enthusiasm and to Pennell it meant a great deal to find at last a master to whom enthusiasm was not a crime. Master and student sometimes worked together in the master's studio, the student's father paying for lessons in watercolor. Sometimes they sketched out of doors. They shared the same subjects and motifs, tried the same methods. This experience more than made up for the mannerisms which by the youth were as quickly dropped as borrowed. 

So the school years went on. Pennell kept up with his class, passed examinations, wrote papers and read them, and when the time came, graduated with honours, the first boy to graduate in the Germantown Friends' School. This was in 1876, the year of the Centennial, and his plans for the shaping of his life were definite and decided. He never doubted that he was created to be an artist, an illustrator, and his energy was devoted to fulfilling his destiny. 

That his friends were shocked and his relations unwilling, was natural. The duty of the American youth of his generation, who had not the means to go to college, was to begin at once to make money. In the America of those days art was thought, if thought of at all, a pleasant pastime, never a lucrative occupation. This was not because Americans were indifferent to art. They simply had no time to think of it, no leisure to spare from the essentials of life for its luxuries. Not until the Centennial which came as a revelation, did Americans realize that art was worthwhile and that they, almost alone among civilized people, were without it.

That summer of 1876 must have been an anxious one in the Pennell household. But the youth wanted his time for the study and practice impossible during his school years. He could repay his family in the years to come, as he did, lavishly, providing comforts and luxuries. He speculated in Cochin China fowls and their eggs brought him enough money to invest in a few casts of hands and feet. Among his other purchases were Ruskin's 'Modern Painter,' pencils, pens, inks, chalks, and paper. In a hot upstairs room under the roof, he drew from the casts, carried out the sketches brought home from long prowls, studied the illustrators whose work most appealed to him and made was he called 'imaginative marines.' He was indefatigable."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

Joseph Pennell: First Success

"On the River" by Joseph Pennell

"In the years before standardized education for everybody was invented, a boy like Joseph Pennell, so preoccupied with drawing, would have been apprenticed to an artist, received a practical training in a practical studio - a workshop - and left to pick up as best he could whatever further education he felt was needed. In the eighteen-seventies Pennell's parents would have reproached themselves had they not given him the schooling considered necessary for all boys and as they were Friends [Quakers], sent him to the Germantown Friends' Select school. 

Happily a drawing class had just been started, an innovation. Drawing teachers in day schools are not art to be eminent artists or inspiring master, but three in the school were above average. One was W.H. Goodyear, eventually the curator of art in the Brooklyn Museum. He lectured on art when practical lessons were what one at least of his pupils wanted. 

His successor, James R. Lambdin, who succeeded him, was a painter of some repute in Philadelphia during his lifetime, and for one thing he should be remembered. Whether or not he studied in Paris under De Boisbaudran, I cannot say, but, like the great French master, he insisted on the necessity to the artist of a trained memory. 

De Boisbaudran would bid his students look at a selected subject until they had memorized it, take no notes or memoranda, and afterwards in the studio put down what they could remember upon paper or canvas. In like fashion Lambdin taught the student to use eyes, brain and memory, a sound foundation for an illustrator. Another of his merits as a teacher was his genuine interest in his students. He showed it one year by offering a prize for the best drawing brought back from the summer holidays. When Pennell's careful study of an ugly house across the street was chosen instead of a rich rival's drawing of Yosemite, and the prize, a silver crayon holder in a leather case, was placed in his hands, he was stunned. He has described how he sat in the schoolroom, bewildered, staring at it, while the class trooped out into the schoolyard and said unkind things, and when he joined them let him know how they felt about it - a heavy price to pay for his first success." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)