Harper's, February

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.

Penfield’s posters, as well as his preliminary pen and wash drawings for his prints, demonstrate his skillful portrayal of simplified scenes of daily life in saturated colors. At this moment in his career, he often exploited the use of spatter or the use of fine dots of greasy wax sprayed onto the zinc plate to create tonality rather than flat areas of color. Although most of his works include only one or two figures, his poster for February 1897 shows four streetcar passengers and the conductor busily reading Harper’s, a typical activity for characters found in his promotional imagery.