JOSEPH PENNELL
he must come there and sketch; and so later in The Century an article appeared entitled "The Most Picturesque Place in the World." Many wrote asking its name and where it was. Besides the article in that magazine, Pennell made one or two of his most famous etchings of that picturesque old French town.
Fisher Unwin spent some time at Zermatt with Mr. and Mrs. Pennell: and there Pennell sketched and climbed. Unwin's idea was that the artist's black-and-white work was perhaps the most satisfactory medium of obtaining the grandeur and simplicity of Alpine effects.
In the course of these wanderings Pennell made drawings of almost every cathedral and cathedral town in Italy, in Spain, in France, in Germany, and in the Low Countries. And Central Europe at one time—Hungary, the Balkans—supplied him with rich and abundant material for his prolific pencil.
Throughout his life Pennell has been a keen and tireless worker. He found in England an inexhaustible mine of architectural beauty. His pencil, his etching needle, or, finally, his lithographic crayon, were always in that wonderful left hand, a hand endowed with swiftness and accuracy in expressing, on paper, on copper, or on stone, the visions of an eye and a mind so sensitive to proportion that he has been able adequately to render, with a few bold lines, the grandeur of an edifice or of some sublime fabric in Nature.
I well remember a lecture at the Adelphi, when Pennell was asked if his lithographs of the Panama Canal did not give an exaggerated idea of the height and depth of the cuttings, because no photographs gave the same impression of bigness. A member of the audience rose and said,
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