Joseph Pennell and the Art of War

ROBERT REED COLE
 

B:
 

orn in Philadelphia in 1860, Joseph Pennell was descended
from two long and distinguished lines of Quakers.
Although one of the prime tenets of that austere Protestant
sect is pacifism, war played a major role in Pennell's personal life and
professional career.

The earliest childhood memory he recalls and recounts in his
autobiography. The Adventures of an Illustrator, is of the Civil War.
After the battle of Gettysburg, he saw Confederate prisoners,
"filthy and horrible who frightened me." In 1865 his family took
him to a house in Philadelphia with a balcony from which they
watched Lincoln's funeral procession as it passed through the city:

.,, away up and down Broad Street was a waving line of shining
steel in the sunlight, and afterwards a great black hearse stopped in
front of the house and everyone cried.

The child of five viewed the events of the Civil War he had wit¬
nessed from a unique perspective: "What I saw and heard then, I
remember, I was an artist from the beginning, for I looked at and
remembered things as an illustrator." Pennell proudly, even defi¬
antly, usually described himself as an "illu.strator" rather than an
"artist."

Before it was possible to reproduce halftone screened photo¬
graphs in newspapers, magazines, and books, the only economical
way to print an illustration was as a line drawing that had been
engraved onto a wood block or metal plate. Of course lithographs
had been used to illustrate books since the early nineteenth century,
but artists who could provide drawings suitable for engraving found
ready markets for their work in the new illu.strated magazines that
appeared after the Civil War, such as The Century and Scribner's. In
Pen Drawing and Pen Draughtsman, the first in his series of manuals
on the graphic arts, Pennell called the Century Company "my
friends and patrons," and went on to state that "publishers to-day
are the greatest art patrons who ever lived."