Edward Penfield Prints
1866–1925 · American · American poster movement
Wall art by Edward Penfield, restored in-house and printed to order on heavyweight matte fine-art paper.
7 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
About Edward Penfield
Edward Penfield was born in Brooklyn in June 1866, studied at the Art Students League and in 1891 became art editor of Harper's Monthly. From 1893 to 1899 he designed a new poster every month to advertise the magazine, flat, outlined figures of well-dressed young Americans reading Harper's on a train, at a café table or on a bicycle, printed in a few colours, and these monthly sheets started the American poster craze of the 1890s and were collected as they appeared. He designed posters for bicycle makers, the Stearns company's Ride a Stearns and be content, the Orient and Northampton cycles, calendars for the publisher R. H. Russell, and book covers. His style came from the Paris posters of Chéret and Steinlen and from Japanese prints, but his subjects were the American college crowd. He left Harper's in 1901 to work as an illustrator and poster designer, painted murals, and taught at the Art Students League. He died at Beacon, New York, in February 1925.