Ponte Vecchio, Florence

Expand

IIIFView PDF

Ponte Vecchio, Florence

Artist Joseph Pennell (American, 1860-1926)

Date1883

Dimensions7 11/16 × 9 3/4 in. (19.5 × 24.8 cm)

Mediumetching

ClassificationPrints

Object number

1912.1181

Not on View

Label TextJoseph Pennell is often credited as the artist who did most to improve the quality of American illustration and to raise its status as an art form. He believed that the artist of printed plates should also be the printer of them. Indeed, he was a master printer as can be seen by the atmospheric effects that he produced in several of the prints shown here. Whistler and Pennell became close, and Whistler apparently asked Pennel and his wife, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, to write his official biography. Pennell recalled, “From the time [the request] was made until within six months of his death Whistler busied himself in supplying us with the necessary data for the work. My own intimacy with him extended over ten years—I knew him twenty years in all—and was of a nature to afford me the most ample opportunity for the study of his character, his peculiarities, his aims, his methods of work….” As for Whistler’s reputation as a “cantankerous, conceited, combative person,” Pennell and his wife endeavored “to reveal a more intimate, tender side of the man than has been attempted heretofore.”Exhibition HistoryAbove Water: Bridges from the Collection July 20 - Oct. 21 2007 TMA Whistler Nov. 1961. TMA, Whistler: Influences, Friends, and the Not-So-Friendly, Feb. 26 - May 30, 2010.