Joseph Pennell

Joseph Pennell's Pictures of the Panama Canal

Drawn between January and March 1912, Pennell, who was afraid that he had arrived in Panama too late to get the pictures he wanted, found instead that the construction was exactly at the right stage. As his world-famous lithographs show, "industry at the Canal was on a colossal scale. The locks were yawning gulfs, their stupendous arches and buttresses not yet hidden as they would be once the water was let in." Joseph Pennell was born in 1857 and died in 1926. He began his work as an illustrator by selling drawings of south Philadelphia to Scribner's Monthly in 1881. In addition to his extensive sketches of American cities, he went to the Panama Canal and sketched a number of construction sites. He taught etching at the Arts Students' league in New York, wrote several books, served as an art critic on the Brooklyn Eagle, and helped run the New Society of Sculptors, Painters & Engravers. Pennell is considered to have done more than any other one artist of his time to improve the quality of illustration both in the United States and abroad and to raise its status as an art. He produced more than 900 etched and mezzotint plates, some 621 lithographs, and innumerable drawings and water colors.