From Cortlandt Street Ferry

Joseph Pennell (1857-1926) was an important American etcher, lithographer and writer who was also one of the major book illustrators of his time. After attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Pennell found work etching historic landmarks and illustrating travel articles and books for American publishers. In 1884 he went to Europe and settled in London. He produced numerous books, both as an author and as an illustrator, many of them in collaboration with his wife, author Elizabeth Robins Pennell. In London his friends included many of the most notable creative figures of the day, including the writers George Bernard Shaw and Robert Louis Stevenson and the Anglo-American painters John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler.

During his lifetime Pennell produced more than 900 etchings and mezzotints and more than 600 lithographs on architectural and landscape subjects ranging from the Panama Canal and Yosemite National Park to the factories of England and the temples of Greece. Pennell distinguished himself not only as one of America's most talented etchers but also as a promotional genius who helped to spur the revival of printmaking and print collecting during the first two decades of the 20th century. His publications include several books on drawing and printmaking, as well as a famous biography of Whistler that he wrote with his wife in 1908. Pennell moved back to the United States during World War I.

This mezzotint, from Pennell's so called 'Second New York set' of prints, is a convincingly moody image of skyscrapers in lower Manhattan outlined against the night sky, with smoke rising and reflections in the foreground. It has been excellently described and contextualised  by Margaret J. Schmitz:

'During the first years of the twentieth century New York City's extraordinary skyscrapers became powerful symbols of America's emergence as an economic and industrial superpower. In the pantheon of artistic depictions of machine age New York, the best-known today were made in the aftermath of the First World War, notably by American artists such as Charles Sheeler and Joseph Stella. However, these figures were building upon an architectural iconography established by precursors active in the century's first decade. During those years, little-studied American artist Joseph Pennell played a key role...  in popularising iconic visions of the metropolis and in establishing a new aesthetic vocabulary to describe it.

'The brazen electrified light in prints such as Pennell's From the Cortlandt Street Ferry (1908) denies the soft contemporaneous visions of the city produced by American Tonalists like Alden Weir's New York nocturnes as well as American impressionist paintings of the city, which possessed a naturalistic sense of depth and retained a traditional Renaissance perspective. Although Pennell did not use mezzotint for long and came to prefer lithography and a more representational style, the 1908 works represent some of the most radical depictions of New York at that time. From the Cortlandt Street Ferry illustrates an abstracted, flattened and elongated New York, more in keeping with aesthetics emerging ten years later in the work of British modernist C.R.W. Nevinson [also in Te Papa's collection] or the American Precisionist Louis Lozowick than any antecedent with whom Pennell may have been familiar.'

See:

Encyclopedia Britannica, 'Joseph Pennell', https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Pennell

Margaret J. Schmitz, 'Joseph Pennell and the Anglo-American Construction of New York', Tate Papers, no.27, Spring 2017, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/27/joseph-pennell, accessed 16 May 2018.

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art    May 2018