Joseph Pennell was an American draftsman, etcher, lithographer, and illustrator for books and magazines. A prolific artist, he spent most of his working life in Europe, and developed an interest in landmarks, landscapes, and industrial scenes around the world. A student of James Lambdin and Thomas Eakins, he was later influenced by James McNeill Whistler. He was married to author Elizabeth Robins, and he also was a writer.
Pennell working at a printing press in 1922
Signed drawing of Pennell by Manuel Rosenberg in 1924
Hail America, a 1909 portrait by Pennell now in the National Gallery of Art
That Liberty Shall Not Perish from the Earth (1918), calls up the pictorial image of a bombed New York City, engulfed in a firestorm
Elizabeth Robins Pennell was an American writer who, for most of her adult life, made her home in London. A researcher summed her up in a work published in 2000 as "an adventurous, accomplished, self-assured, well-known columnist, biographer, cookbook collector, and art critic"; in addition, she wrote travelogues, mainly of European cycling voyages, and memoirs, centred on her London salon. Her biographies included the first in almost a century of the proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, one of her uncle the folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, and one of her friend the painter Whistler. In recent years, her art criticism has come under scrutiny, and her food criticism has been reprinted.
Sketch of Pennell by her husband Joseph
Cover of Mary Wollstonecraft, Pennell's first book
A Humber tandem tricycle, circa 1885