Joseph Pennell: Beginnings

"Upsala, Germantown" by Joseph Pennell

Elizabeth Robins Pennell wrote: "Joseph Pennell's father was a sad, silent man. His wife had died before we were married, nor could I ever get the impression of the woman she was from Joseph. He rarely spoke of her, though he could not say enough of the sympathetic, practical help his father gave him when he was young. All the same, father and son were poles apart. 

From the start Joseph was sufficient unto himself, happiest when no one shared his games, finding his own amusements, inventing stories, making drawings to illustrate them. I have sheets of these early drawings, in pencil, in watercolor, in colored chalks, on odd scraps of paper, bits of old letters, envelopes, books of unused cheques his father brought home - on anything he could find. The greater number of early drawings in my possession are of war. And it is amazing how full of character, life, movement they are. Soldiers march, horses prance. That they are the work of a child is unmistakable. He was not the infant phenomenon picked up in the schools or on the roadside by patrons of art who patronize and praise until promise vanishes like smoke. But an enthusiasm for his subject and a power of observation that were Joseph Pennell's through his working life are unmistakable in these childish illustrations of childish war stories.

After his family had moved from Philadelphia out to Germantown, an open green suburb, he found himself taking walks alone. He drew the old houses, the old mills, and the woods and streams. Untrained, untaught, he knew the right things, seeing beauty in the beautiful. 'Once, he wrote, 'I went away up Germantown Avenue to Cresheim Creek, winding then through open fields, till I came to the glen and then the gorge which carries it to the Wissahickon. It was so beautiful that I sat down, all alone, and cried for the beauty of it. And then I tried to draw it.' In this incident you see Joseph Pennell, the illustrator, as he was through life. I, who later went on so many of his journeys with him, know how, when he came to the place where he was to work, there was the long wandering in search of his subject; when he found it, the pleasure that is akin to pain in its beauty, and then the oblivion to everything save the endeavour to express its beauty in terms of art."

To be continued

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