Joseph Pennell’s America: The Wonder of Work without Labor

Eric Segal

For American illustrator Joseph Pennell, much of modernity was a ruination of the aesthetic, a disastrous series of missteps by so-called artists and progressives. Lamenting immigration in America as bitterly as he did the transformation of picturesque Europe, he nonetheless celebrated views of Old World cities and New York skyscrapers. Despite his distaste for change, a favorite theme for him was “the wonder of work,” by which he meant great feats of industry and engineering. Given his distaste for Jews, blacks and immigrants of all stripes, it is not surprising to find his vision of both Europe and of industrial America largely unpopulated. Whether as a travel illustrator lending his designs to books by Henry James and William Dean Howells, or as a documenter of monuments including the Panama Canal and Statue of Liberty, he continually looked back and forth across the Atlantic to locate an utopic reprieve from modern social ails.

Pennell was also a tireless advocate of illustration as a practice, devoting several volumes to its history and techniques. This paper will examine the meaning of illustration as a form for Pennell and for his contemporaries, in order to discover connotative potentials of the medium to address prevailing anxieties shared by many Americans at the turn of the century. In particular, it seemed that illustration could serve as both sword and salve when encountering anxieties cohering around race and immigration in a rapidly changing America. Pennell turned first one way -- to old Europe -- and then another -- to massive industrial sights, in an evolving effort to simultaneously seize a sense of historical continuity and of triumphant national modernity, and to join these through a nostalgic reverie of Anglo-American purity. His illustrations, I argue, embody structural tensions of his attempts to historicize modernity around the problem of race.