The Fountains Playing at La Granga, from Castilian Days

Joseph Pennell · 1903

Medium

Litho crayon with stumping and erasing, heightened with white gouache, on cream textured transfer paper

Original size

19.3 × 25.6 cm (7 5/8 × 10 1/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

Pennell's study of the royal fountains at La Granja de San Ildefonso captures the fleeting drama of water and light that made this Spanish palace garden one of the most celebrated spectacles in nineteenth-century travel writing. Joseph Pennell was among the foremost American printmakers of his era, spending much of his career in Europe documenting architecture and landscape with an illustrator's eye for atmosphere. This work, created for his series accompanying John Hay's *Castilian Days*, shows his mastery of the lithographic crayon — using stumping and erasing to build soft tonal gradients, then lifting the image with white gouache to suggest the spray and shimmer of the jets. The result sits somewhere between drawing and painting, luminous without being theatrical. Pennell was a close friend and devoted champion of Whistler, and that influence is visible here in the restrained tonal palette and the way the composition breathes around its focal point. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Pennell's delicate tonal work into the warmth and depth that only oil paint can deliver, preserving the play of light across water while giving the image a presence that suits it to any wall.