Fourth Street, Meeting House, Philadelphia 1920

Joseph Pennell made this etching, *Fourth Street, Meeting House, Philadelphia*, sometime during his career. Look at the surface and how it seems to quiver, built up of tiny marks that describe the facade of the building and the soft shapes of the trees. Pennell might have stood on the street corner, plate in hand, trying to capture the atmosphere. I like to think of the decisions he made: how to translate something real into a set of marks, and how the pressure of the tool created different thicknesses of the line. The details emerge slowly: the angle of the roof, the paving stones, the figures going about their day. There’s a relationship here to Whistler, an interest in capturing a specific place. It’s Pennell’s own kind of realism, which is really about choosing where to look and what to emphasize. Like all artists, he took what he saw and made something new.