The Dock Head 1905

Joseph Pennell made this etching, “The Dock Head,” with ink on paper. Look at how the grey ink spreads and bleeds. I can almost feel the artist hovering over the plate, carefully layering the tones and marks. Pennell clearly had a love of industry, and of cityscapes, but I wonder what he felt as he captured the scene. Was he trying to capture the energy of this working site? The boats are still, yet the docks are heavy with the promise of activity. The sky is full of foreboding and maybe Pennell was also trying to record the precarity of the labor involved. You can see the influence of Whistler in the way the composition is handled. It shows how artists are always in conversation with one another, riffing off each other’s ideas and techniques. I like to think of Pennell as part of a wider artistic community, all pushing the boundaries of what art can be. It’s a form of embodied expression which embraces ambiguity and uncertainty.