The Monasteries of Alcalá, from Castilian Days

Joseph Pennell · 1903

Medium

Litho crayon and white gouache, on cream textured transfer paper

Original size

21.7 × 28.2 cm (8 9/16 × 11 1/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

Pennell's view of the monasteries rising above the Castilian plain has the quiet authority of a place that has stood indifferent to centuries — all tonal mass and atmospheric stillness, rendered with the precision of someone who had trained his eye on the architecture of a dozen European cities. Joseph Pennell was among the finest architectural draughtsmen of his era, an American artist who spent decades crossing Europe on assignment for illustrated journals and books, turning facades, bridges, and skylines into prints of extraordinary sensitivity. Working here in litho crayon with white gouache on cream transfer paper, he built up his tones with a delicacy more associated with watercolour than printmaking — the textured paper doing as much work as the crayon itself. Pennell was a close friend and devoted collaborator of James McNeill Whistler, co-authoring a two-volume biography of him; that friendship with one of the era's great tonalists is visible in the subdued, silvery palette Pennell consistently favoured. A hand-painted oil reproduction translates all of this onto canvas with the depth and physicality that print cannot carry — the layered glazes catching the same quality of diffused Castilian light that Pennell himself was reaching for in 1903.