Rago and Toomey & Co. are pleased to offer over 100 works in an auction dedicated to Edward Penfield: American Illustrator on May 18th with all material sourced directly from the artist’s estate. Like Alphonse Mucha and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who helped to define the popular Art Nouveau style of graphic art in Europe at the end of the 19th century, Edward Penfield is largely credited with setting the tone for the Golden Age of American poster art during the same period.
The sale on May 18th includes compositions dating to various parts of Penfield’s esteemed career — from his early days at Harper & Brothers, to his tenure as art director, to his later freelance work for other publishers and his travels in Holland and Spain. Showcasing Penfield’s wide array of favorite themes, the mediums available include: gouache, watercolor, and oil paintings; ink, graphite, and charcoal illustrations; mixed media and collages; lithographs and posters; plus sketches, bound drawings, and other ephemera.
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1866, Edward Penfield was the third of five children. His father Josiah was a bookkeeper and flour merchant and his mother Ellen was a homemaker. Edward had an uncle on his father’s side named Henry who worked in an engraving studio in Manhattan. During his youth, Edward was first exposed to the world of commercial art through his uncle and he eventually decided to pursue an artistic career himself. In the late 1880s, Penfield enrolled at the Art Students League of New York, where he trained with painter George de Forest Brush. After being discovered at a student exhibition, Penfield was hired by Harper & Brothers as a part-time art editor and illustrator while he finished his coursework.
Within three years, Penfield replaced art director Frederick B. Schell and began designing prominent artwork for the various Harper & Brothers publishing ventures, including covers for Harper’s monthly magazine. Penfield’s debut poster cover for the April 1893 issue, showing a man in rain gear reading the publication, drew immediate enthusiastic attention for its purity of concept and evocative spareness.
In an article for The Chap-Book, Herbert Stone, who would go on to serve as editor for Yachting magazine, described Penfield’s first Harper’s cover as “unlike anything seen in the land before. It was a poster which forced itself upon one: in design and colour, it was striking, and yet it was supremely simple throughout […] it was theoretically as well as practically good. The artist had attained his ends by the suppression of details: there were no un-necessary lines.”
Over the next seven years, Penfield would create posters for every successive issue of Harper’s monthly magazine. His art revolutionized American poster design in much the same way that Alphonse Mucha, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Théophile Steinlen did in Europe at the close of the 19th century. However, in contrast to fellow American artists William Bradley and Louis Rhead, Penfield did not conform to the elaborately curved linework of French Art Nouveau illustration. His particular stroke of genius was to streamline the Art Nouveau style with aspects of Japanese ukiyo-e printmaking.
In addition to magazine cover illustrations, Penfield produced book covers for Harper & Brothers. At the turn of the 20th century, he was not only the publishing house’s star artist but also an important figure in the American art world generally. In 1901, internal politics and restructuring at Harper & Brothers led to Penfield’s rather unexpected departure. He was encouraged to “retire” and pursue freelance work. Nevertheless, while Penfield’s time at Harper & Brothers amounted to just one third of his career, his illustrations for Harper’s magazine in particular cemented his legacy, which continues to exert an influence on American poster art.
Following his exit from Harper & Brothers, Penfield created freelance illustrations for leading publications, such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Life, Scribner’s, Literary Digest, The Country Gentleman, and Metropolitan Magazine. He also taught at the Art Students League and was a member of several arts organizations, including the Society of Illustrators, where he eventually served as president.
At the outset of the 20th century, Penfield received commissions to travel to Holland and Spain. While visiting Holland, he wrote and illustrated a series of articles on Dutch life, which Scribner & Sons published in 1907 as a book, Holland Sketches. Penfield’s subsequent trip to Spain in 1911 led to a similar book, Spanish Sketches. On these excursions, Penfield often took photographs that he turned into studies in his sketchbooks before finalizing the works in gouache and watercolor with ink.
Along with Penfield’s covers for Harper’s, other magazine illustrations, portraits, interior scenes, landscapes, and sketches from his European voyages, the auction on May 18th features a number of works with animals. Penfield was especially fond of rendering horses, riders on horseback, and horse-drawn vehicles as well as saddles and harnesses; he maintained a collection of both on the ground floor under his studio. Penfield also produced compositions depicting sheep, cows, giraffes, zebras, cats, roosters, and parrots.
Edward Penfield passed away in 1925 at the age of fifty-eight due to complications from a spinal injury that he suffered during a fall the year previous. Despite a premature end to his career, Penfield’s unparalleled artistic approach and extraordinary contribution to American illustration came to define the Golden Age of American poster art and his visual style remains as timeless and collectible today as it was over 100 years ago.
