Joseph Pennell

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Joseph Pennell (July 4, 1857 – April 23, 1926) was an American artist and author. Pennell was 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. He produced numerous 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.

Pennell did the poster for the fourth Liberty Loans campaign of 1918. It showed the entrance to the New York City harbor under aerial and naval bombardment, with New York in flames and the Statue of Liberty partly destroyed, her head and her torch blown off.

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• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.