Superb Puerta del Sol, from Castilian Days

Joseph Pennell · 1903

Medium

Litho crayon with smudging, heightened with white gouache, on cream textured transfer paper

Original size

28.3 × 21.8 cm (11 3/16 × 8 5/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

Pennell's *Superb Puerta del Sol* conjures Madrid's great public square as a theatre of light and shadow, its bustling architecture rendered with the kind of atmospheric weight that makes a mere street scene feel like a historic document. Joseph Pennell was one of the foremost graphic artists of his generation — an American who spent much of his career in Europe, developing an extraordinary command of etching and lithography at a time when those mediums were enjoying serious critical revival. This work, produced in litho crayon with smudging and heightened with white gouache on cream transfer paper, shows the technique at its most expressive: the gouache lifting buildings out of the hazy midground while the crayon dissolves the street level into crowd and motion. The result reads less like illustration and more like memory. Pennell was a close friend and devoted biographer of James McNeill Whistler, and that influence — the preference for mood over documentation — runs through his Spanish work. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Pennell's tonal language into a medium with physical presence, preserving the depth of his shadows and the luminous pull of his highlighted facades on a surface that rewards close looking.