Edward Penfield

Edward Penfield (June 2, 1866 – February 8, 1925)^[1] was an American illustrator in the era known as the "Golden Age of American Illustration" and he is considered the father of the American poster. His work has been included in almost every major book on American Illustration or the history of the poster. He is also a major figure in the evolution of graphic design.^[2]

He was born June 2, 1866, in Brooklyn, New York, to Ellen Lock Moore and Josiah B. Penfield. He first studied at New York's Art Students League. He worked under George de Forest Brush, who was known for his romantic scenes of American Indian life. He first worked for Harper's Weekly and later became art director. He developed his own unique style of simplified figures with bold outlines in settings free of extraneous detail. He believed, "A design that needs study is not a poster, no matter how well executed."^[3] He wrote and published a book titled Holland Sketches, which was published by Scribner's in 1907.^[4]

Penfield lived in New Rochelle, New York, a popular art colony among actors, writers and artists of the period. The community was most well known for its unprecedented number of prominent American illustrators.^[5] He was one of the founding members of the New Rochelle Art Association which was organized in 1912.

His posters were bold and stood out from a distance with great clarity. As artists like Alphonse Mucha, Théophile Steinlen and Toulouse-Lautrec popularized the poster in Europe, Penfield accomplished the same feat in the United States. For his posters, Penfield utilized simple shapes and a limited palette of colors that lent themselves to the primitive methods of reproduction of the era.

• Harper's Magazine, June 1896
  Harper's Magazine, June 1896
• Book cover: Three Gringos by Richard Harding Davis, 1896
  Book cover: Three Gringos by Richard Harding Davis, 1896
• Exlibris
  Exlibris
• Harper's Magazine, May 1897
  Harper's Magazine, May 1897
• Poster published in Les Maîtres de l'Affiche
  Poster published in Les Maîtres de l'Affiche

• Walt Reed, America's Great Illustrators, Abbeville Press, 1979, p. 114
• Edward Penfield, Holland Sketches, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907

• Works by Edward Penfield at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Edward Penfield at the Internet Archive
• UNCG American Publishers' Trade Bindings: Edward Penfield
• "Penfield, Edward"  . Collier's New Encyclopedia . 1921.
• Edward Penfield at Library of Congress, with 236 library catalog records

• 1866 births
• 1925 deaths
• American illustrators
• Artists from New Rochelle, New York
• American poster artists
• 19th-century American painters
• American male painters
• 20th-century American painters
• 19th-century American male artists
• 20th-century American male artists

• CS1: long volume value
• Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the Dictionary of American Biography
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles with hCards
• Commons category link is on Wikidata
• Articles with Project Gutenberg links
• Articles with Internet Archive links
• Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from Collier's Encyclopedia