Storytelling in Miniature

Joseph Pennell
American, 1860–1926

At Lynchburg, Virginia

Aquatint and etching, 1883
3 x 4 3/4 in.
Museum purchase, 1912.1179

Joseph Pennell is often credited as the artist who did the most to improve the quality of American illustration and to raise its status as an art form. He believed that the artist who etched the plates should also print the images; and he was himself a master printer. In this etching, Pennell gives us his interpretation of a Southern genre scene, featuring a dilapidated tenement-like building above a small stream.