Pennell

In a room whose windows looked across a river to the towers of Manhattan, Joseph Pennell, etcher, died last week. He had been ill of pneumonia for a week.

No splendor of granite towers watched his adolescence. He was born in Philadelphia, in 1860, and worked as a clerk in a railroad office, studying when he had time in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He sold his first drawings--some illustrations for a story in the Century Magazine--when he was 21. Two years later he went abroad to draw the illustrations for William Dean Howell's Tuscan Cities, and remained for some time on the Continent, living in Paris, in Italy. He knew Henry James in the days when that sensitive young man was trying to recover from the shock of calling on De Maupassant and finding him, not unaccompanied, in bed. He was a friend of Whistler, whose charm had an immense influence upon him and whose acid humor was not unlike his own. He drank wine with Andrew Lang; he knew Edmund Gosse and F. Hopkinson Smith, "whose books," he said of the latter, "I never could stand--or the sight of him either." Then he came back to America and began work on the etchings of forges, skyscrapers, workshops, mills, excavations, cities, that made him famous.

Perhaps the placid landscapes in which he, had spent most of his life had begun to vex him a little; perhaps their dreaming beauty was the very irritant that made him take fire at seeing, as if for the first time, the walls and towers, monuments of a fierce physical necessity, that industrial life was evolving here. The City of New York spoke its rocky sermon to him and he, better than any other etcher of this time, understood what it was saying. "When you go out on the ferry to Staten Island," he wrote, "there is one moment on the trip when, looking back to Manhattan, you see the city cleft by the canyon of Broadway. I say that the Grand Canyon has nothing to equal that sight. . . ."

To draw what he saw he discarded detail, the etcher's common resource. He used mass and shadow as a sculptor uses them, giving what is so hard to give in any two-dimensional art--the sense of a core, an inner heart of energy whose force, diffused through the etching, creates the thing seen, tower or bridge or buttress, as a piece of inevitable logic, the peremptory gesture of a hidden impulse. When he drew a crane he was not interested in making an accurate picture of a piece of machinery used to lift stones; the crane became as vital a thing as a comet, a mountain or a waterfall. This is the quality that informs all his best work: his bridges poised in tensile grace over tugboats and coal barges; his factory forges; his skyscrapers lifting, tier by tier, their walls and towers and denticulated terraces into the sky.

He was not a genius, in the word's jargon connotation. Something was denied his hand. He left his illustrations for the Century Magazine far behind, but he could never express himself perfectly. A certain crabbedness entered his nature through his sense of frustration. On a small scale he had the Michelangelic misanthropy. He said of his teacher, Duveneck "He liked me--which most people do not."

When age began to dull his fingers, he kept it from dulling his wits by teaching art and writing. He wrote Whistler's biography (Whistler had asked him to); and his own memoirs (The Adventure of an Illustrator) (TIME, Dec. 28). He took a great interest in students; would arrange exhibitions of their work at well-known galleries and then privately buy in half the exhibits. He toured the country giving lectures, and he talked a great deal, often tediously, about beauty and ugliness. But beyond doubt he well deserved the many honors that fell to him; beyond doubt it was fitting that death, when it came, found him looking westward, through a high window, at the city he had drawn as no man had been able to draw it before him.