People We Pass: Stories of Life among the Masses of New York City

Regarded as one of the most influential poster artists in America, Edward Penfield joined the publishing house Harper and Brothers at the age of twenty-five as a staff artist and editor. Shortly after his promotion to artistic director, Penfield created his first lithograph for Harper’s Magazine in 1893. Following its runaway success, he made posters advertising each successive issue of the magazine for over seven years. Magazine readers and poster collectors celebrated his designs for their boldness, abstraction, and occasional comic touch. Penfield also created advertisements and cover designs for books published by Harper and Brothers.

As the most acclaimed artist working for Harper’s, Penfield was free to experiment with avant-garde styles. Less concerned with the dramatic curving lines of Art Nouveau than his contemporaries, Penfield synthesized a number of stylistic sources in his work, including Japanese ukiyo-e prints and posters made by contemporary French and British artists. Penfield’s work for Harper’s displays a late nineteenth-century American type—the wealthy and well-appointed middle-class individual enjoying leisure time. Penfield himself was part of this newly emerging middle class.

This poster advertises a compilation of seven short stories by Julian Ralph originally published in Harper’s Magazine. In the book, Ralph fictionalizes the lives of ordinary New Yorkers he met while working as a seasoned journalist at the New York Sun. As a reporter, he wrote about communities of people who were not represented in the city’s mainstream press. Often his interviewees were immigrants who lived in small and packed tenements, in a swarm, almost indistinguishable to an outsider. Not only a witness to the everyday lives of these people, he was invited to their weddings, wakes, funerals, picnics, excursions, and dances—all of which he documented in his written work. For Ralph, each person he passed on the street became a potential subject with a story waiting to be told.