8 3/4 x 6 1/4 in. (Impression). Born in Philadelphia, and first studied there, but like his compatriot and friend, James McNeill Whistler, he afterwards went to Europe and made his home in London. Joseph Pennell had many etchings that depicted historic landmarks in the city of Philadelphia. His etching of Wakefield- Fisher's Lane was created in 1882. This was the mansion of William Logan Fisher which was standing until 1985. It would have been located on the corner of Ogontz and Lindley Avenues near La Salle University's St. Basil Court.] He wrote and illustrated an anti-Semitic travel book, The Jew at Home: Impressions of a Summer and Autumn Spent with Him (D. Appleton: New York, 1892), based on his travels in Europe. In his preface he writes, "I am neither a Jew hater nor a Jew lover," but he describes "the Austro-Hungarian or Russian Jew [as] the most contemptible specimen of humanity in Europe...dreaded by the peasant...loathed by people of every religion," he describes the typical Polish Jewish town as "a hideous nightmare of dirt, disease, and poverty; and...all this disease and ugliness is in a large measure the outcome of their own habits and way of life," and later he says of Russian Jews, "They like dirt; they like to herd together in human pigsties;...they like to make money out of the immorality of the Christian. They are simply a race of middlemen and money-changers." He produced numerous other books (many of them in collaboration with his wife, Elizabeth Robins Pennell), but his chief distinction is as an original etcher and lithographer, and notably as an illustrator. Their close acquaintance with Whistler led the Pennells to undertake a biography of that artist in 1906, and, after some litigation with his executrix on the right to use his letters, the book was published in 1908.

Good condition