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.)