Edward Penfield and the Birth of the American Poster

A man in a green coat stands in the rain. He doesn't seem to mind. His gaze is fixed on an issue of Harper's Magazine, and everything around him has shrunk to a few calm fields of color. The motif is almost embarrassingly simple. Yet, passers-by stopped in front of it on the streets of 1890s New York.

Thus began one of graphic design's most influential careers.

Who was Edward Penfield?

Edward Penfield was born in Brooklyn in 1866. He studied at the Art Students League in New York under the painter George de Forest Brush. While still a student, an editor at the Harper & Brothers publishing house noticed his work at a school exhibition. This led to a job offer. Penfield was around 24 years old when he joined the publisher as a part-time artist and editor. A couple of years later, he had taken over as art director.

He is often called the father of the American poster. The title is well-deserved. When Penfield started, there was hardly any American poster art to speak of. At the first major poster exhibition in the country, organized by the Grolier Club in New York in 1890, only seven out of a hundred works were by Americans. Europe already had its stars. Jules Chéret, Alphonse Mucha, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had transformed the street's advertising pillars into art. In the USA, the ground was largely unbroken. That's where Penfield stepped in.

The Harper's Posters

In 1893, Penfield created his first lithographic poster for Harper's Magazine. It was an immediate success. After that, he designed a new poster for each new issue of the magazine, month after month, for over seven years until he left the publisher in 1901.

It is this series that made him famous. The posters hung in bookstores and newsstands and were meant to sell the magazine. But they did more than that. They functioned as small, independent works of art. Many people collected them even then. The New York Public Library eventually bound an entire volume of his posters.

Penfield's motifs often depicted a particular kind of American. Well-dressed, self-assured, and elegantly idle. A woman picking roses with the magazine in her hand. A gentleman in a thick coat. People in the middle of a calm, everyday gesture. It was an image of comfortable middle-class leisure, presented without being contrived.

What characterizes Edward Penfield's art?

The first thing you notice is the simplicity. Penfield built his images from large, flat color fields and clear outlines. He stripped away everything that was not needed. Backgrounds were reduced to a single tone or disappeared entirely. What remained was the silhouette, the form, and a few carefully chosen colors.

This simplicity was deliberate. In the preface to the book Posters in Miniature from 1896, he articulated his view on the matter. A poster should tell its story immediately. An image that requires reflection is not a poster, no matter how skillfully made. He added that the contemporary era was a bit tired of the solemn and that a touch of levity could be refreshing.

This attitude is evident in his works. They are relaxed yet sharp. There is often a quiet humor in them, a nod to the changing seasons or to the carefree lifestyles he depicted. His figures rarely pose. They read, walk, wait, or look away.

Technically, the style benefited from the printing methods of the time. Color printing had recently made great strides, but it still could only handle a limited number of colors. Penfield turned this limitation into a strength. Fewer colors resulted in cleaner forms. The form carried the image.

Many of his works bear a small bull's head as a mark. It served almost as a signature and became a recognizable sign for those who collected his prints.

Where did Penfield find his inspiration?

Penfield borrowed freely but made the expression his own. The traces from Japanese woodcuts in the ukiyo-e tradition are most evident. From there came the flat pictorial space, the confident outline, and the idea of color as surface rather than light and shadow.

He was also well-versed in French poster art. Toulouse-Lautrec, Chéret, and Théophile Steinlen were in the background. From England, he picked up something from the Beggarstaff brothers, i.e., James Pryde and William Nicholson, who worked with bold cut-out forms. Penfield is even said to have mentioned Egyptian sarcophagus paintings as a source. That sounds far-fetched, but it says something about how he thought. He was less interested in realistic reproduction than in pure, legible form.

Unlike many contemporaries, he was not as strongly drawn to the winding lines of Art Nouveau. Where others swirled into decorative tendrils, Penfield held back. This makes his images unusually straightforward and modern for their time.

What motifs reappeared in his art?

Certain subjects appeared again and again. Horses and carriages were a real passion. Penfield collected old stagecoaches, harnesses, and carriages. Beneath his studio, he had a small private museum of vehicles that he could draw from. This fascination is evident in recurring motifs with horse-drawn carriages and old country roads.

He also captured the new pleasures of his time early on. One of his posters from October 1894 is considered one of the first American posters featuring a bicycle. Around the same time, he created one of the early American motifs depicting American football. Penfield had an eye for what was happening at the time and allowed it to take its place in his images.

What happened after Harper's?

Penfield left Harper & Brothers in 1901 after reorganization and internal politics made the time ripe for something new. As a freelancer, he then contributed covers and illustrations to magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Scribner's, and Life.

Assignments also took him abroad. An early freelance trip went to Holland and resulted in the book Holland Sketches from 1907, which he both wrote and illustrated. He also traveled to Spain. Alongside his magazine work, he created appreciated calendars for the Beck Engraving Company, prints that other artists saved long after the calendar year had ended.

Penfield taught at the Art Students League and was deeply involved in the art scene. He settled in New Rochelle outside New York, a town that attracted an unusually large number of illustrators, and co-founded the New Rochelle Art Association in 1912. He was later elected president of the Society of Illustrators.

He died in 1925, at the age of 58, after complications from a back injury. His career ended early. His influence, however, became all the greater.

Why does Edward Penfield feel relevant today?

The strange thing about Penfield's images is how contemporary they look. The flat color, the clean outline, and the limited palette point directly to much of what we today call graphic design. A poster from 1895 can hang next to a new print and feel just as modern.

This is probably part of the reason why his motifs still work on a wall. They are clear from a distance. They don't impose themselves. A solitary figure against a calm color field gives the room something to rest in without taking over. This kind of graphic stillness pairs well with a stripped-down, Scandinavian design language.

For those drawn to retro and early graphic art, Penfield is a natural entry point. At Care of Posters, you'll find motifs in the same spirit, printed on 200 g FSC-certified Fine Art paper with a matte surface that doesn't glare. A graphic print of this kind benefits from paper that allows the color fields to remain clean and still, just as Penfield envisioned them.

He wanted an image to tell its story at once. More than a hundred years later, his best works still do just that.

See our collection of Edward Penfield art prints and posters