Girard Trust Building 1920

This is Joseph Pennell’s etching of the Girard Trust Building. Pennell seems to have been interested in the process of repetition and variation that comes with etching. With the cross hatching in the columns he’s interested in how much information he can pull from a very limited palette. There's a real dance between the architecture and the soft ground in the foreground, look at how he suggests a crowd forming outside the building. Pennell makes a lot of light with just a little dark, and in the areas where the ink is built up it gives the piece a real sense of texture. You get the impression of the building being this large, looming structure because of the physicality of the marks. It reminds me a bit of Piranesi, he similarly uses architecture as a jumping off point for complex and dreamlike compositions. Like Piranesi, Pennell’s etching is a reminder that art can be a space where ambiguity and multiple interpretations are embraced.