From: Miriam Stewart [mailto:miriam_stewart@harvard.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 6:53 PM
To: Nadine.Orenstein@metmuseum.org; Print Council List serve (E-mail)
Cc: roger@childsgallery.com
Subject: Re: Joseph Pennell's Birth Year

Further to Nadine's message about Pennell's birthdate--we have a copy of a letter from Elizabeth Pennell to the Clayton Galleries, dated July 27, 1934, in which she writes that her husband was born on the 4th of July, 1857. "He was under the impression that the year was 1860 because that was the date recorded by the few documents he could consult when he wrote his Adventures of an Illustrator. And the family seemed to have forgotten [!!] for the date was registered in the Orange Street Meeting House, Philadelphia, which a few years later was destroyed by fire. However, when I was writing his Life, an old friend of his, a Quaker, told me that all the Orange Street records had been removed to the Fourth and Arch Street Meeting House and there the date can now be found--July 4th, 1857."


Previously, from Nadine Orenstein, Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Authoritative sources are using different birth years (most commonly 1857 and 1860).

On the side of 1860:
Print Council
The Metropolitan Museum
Benezit
Who Was Who in American Art (Falk)

On the side of 1857:
The National Gallery of Art
The Library of Congress (holds the Pennell Collection and Pennell Fund)
Grove Art Online
Museum of Fine Arts Boston (recently updated to conform to Grove Art).
Fogg Art Museum
Elizabeth Robins Pennell The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell pp. 7-8

E. R. Pennell fully discusses the problem as follows: "By 1857 that fireside was in a characteristic little two story house-red brick white shutters, white marble steps-in South 9th Street, Number 183 changed to Number 603, near Shippen, and there on the Fourth of July, Joseph Pennell was born. He himself was in doubt as to the exact date of his birth. It was registered in the Orange Street Meetinghouse, for he was a birthright member, and the Meetinghouse burnt down long before he began to write his Adventures of an Illustrator. At home his birthday and his country's had been celebrated together and he therefore felt justified in continuing to celebrate his on the Fourth of July, while 1860, judging from his earliest adventures, he thought must be the year. What he did not know was that the Orange Street Meeting had been merged with the Fourth and Arch Street Meeting and that to this older Meetinghouse, before the fire, all records had been removed from Orange Street, among them the birth record of Joseph Pennell. This gives the date 7-4-1857 which, in looking through old family papers, I found confirmed in a letter from Larkin Pennell to "My Dear Sister", dated Seventh Month, fifth, 1857: "I am glad to inform you that Rebecca has a nice little babe, a son...it took place yesterday about 3 o'clock P.M. so that we have again celebrated the fourth."

On July 7, 1857, E. R. Pennell reports that Larkin Pennell wrote: "We have named him Joseph after my father."

It would appear that the matter is clear that Joseph Pennell was born July 4, 1857, but that he used July 4, 1860 most, if not all of his life.