Joseph Pennell: Italy

"Porto Romano, Florence"
by Joseph Pennell

"The immediate outcome of the 'Century's' satisfaction with Joseph Pennell's work was another more important commission for ten etchings to illustrate a series of articles on Tuscan cities by William Dean Howells, whose fame was in its full glory. It may be worth recording that for these ten etchings Pennell was offered five hundred dollars, together with his steamer ticket going and coming, nor was he to make any use of the prints until after their publication. He accepted, because the work would take him to countries it was his desire to see, also because he knew that if he made good plates, he would be amply repaid later on in reputation, if not in money. Besides, he who found work everywhere, would find other things to do along the way. In fact the 'Century' added one additional illustration of Edinburgh and twelve of the English Cathedrals. And while in London he approached the editors of the 'Portfolio,' 'Magazine of Art' and 'Art Journal, and got them to promise at least to look at any drawings he might send from Italy.

He made straight for Florence and Howells, but felt far more at home there with a little English group whom he got to know almost immediately, much to his surprise. He had been hardly any time in Florence before he was on intimate terms with Mary Robinson, to whom a first volume of poems had brought fame; Vernon Lee who had begun to write her learned and flamboyant essays on art; Evelyn Pickering, re-echoing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in her paintings and another and very different set - 'the Duveneck Boys.' Duveneck was off in Venice but four or five of the 'Boys' lingered in Florence, met with Pennell of an evening in the little hole of a trattoria where, for the sake of good company and cheapness, they dined together.

The story is in his letters to me, the story of the American youth for the first time under the spell of an Italy which was not yet a hopeless prey to tourists and progress - the youth with eyes wide open to beauty, with no ambition save to capture that beauty and imprison it on paper or copper plate, with the keen journalistic instinct that made him discover articles wherever he went, with a tendency to black despair when work did not go right, to bubbling over with high spirits when it did. 

By July Pennell's illustrations for 'Century,' Howell's 'Florentine Mosaic,' were finished. In addition, he managed to send to London illustrations for three articles by Vernon Lee: 'The Youth of Raphael,' published in the 'Art Journal,' 'North Tuscan Cities' in the 'Magazine of Art,' and 'San Gimignano of Many Towers' in the 'Portfolio.' In Venice he made not only a series of etchings but drawings to illustrate three articles on 'The Artist in Venice' by Julia Cartwright. He could start north with an easy conscience. He had put his best into his etchings and he knew they were good."

 To be continued

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