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.)