April 27, 1925

The eminent and prolific American etcher, illustrator and author Joseph Pennell gave a demonstration of etching in connection with the Taylor Hall exhibition of etchings. With his wife Elizabeth Robins Pennell, the authorized biographer of their friend James McNeill Whistler, The Life of James McNeill Whistler (1909), Pennell published dozens of books illustrating cities—London, New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia—and regions—France, Italy, England’s Lake District—as well as studies of the building of the Panama Canal, of “the wonder of work,” of “war work in England and in America” and of The Jew at Home: Impressions of a Summer and Autumn Spent with Him in Russia and Austria (1892).

At the time of his death in 1926, The New York Times quoted the appreciation of Pennell’s studies of English munitions factories during World War I by English author and man of letters H. G. Wells: “He sees these forges, workshops, cranes and the like as inhuman and as wonderful as cliffs or great caves or icebergs, or the stars. They are a new aspect of the logic of physical necessity that made all these older things, and he seizes upon the majesty and beauty of their dimensions with an entire impartiality.”