XIX. PENNELL.

MR. PENNELL is an extremely clever, energetic, dexterous American, who has found profitable employment in our English land. He has shown himself to be a ready journalist in draughtsmanship. Drawing architecture and the scenes of the street, he has produced not a little art that is at once popular and tolerable; and he has even written about Art, dealing sometimes with far profounder people than his own order of mind permits him thoroughly to fathom. “Critic,” therefore, I cannot call him, but able draughtsman, in a limited field, he unquestionably is.

A somewhat small proportion of Mr. Pennel work has consisted of etching, and in this he has shown, first, it appears, the influence of Seymour Haden, and next, the influence of Whistler. Had he but brought a personality to be enriched and fructified by great traditions! That, however, has been denied him; and, possessed

JOSEPH PENNELL. “LE PUY EN VELAY.”

well of the grammar of his art, and of some of the best of its methods, he yet, as his own work reveals him, is, at times, uninteresting, since he is always unimaginative. Vista he has none. Yet, how good can his work be when the subject comes easily to help him! Nor is that seldom. The plate of “Le Puy en Velay,” of which I give a reproduction, and which I like so much, recalls a noble Dürer background—takes our thoughts to those great elder masters who, from certain remarks that he has made about them, I judge that Mr. Pennell scarcely likes at all. It is the irony of circumstance.