Pastime Stories

Regarded as one of the most influential poster artists in America, Edward Penfield joined the publishing house Harper and Brothers at the age of twenty-five as a staff artist and editor. Shortly after his promotion to artistic director, Penfield created his first lithograph for Harper’s Magazine in 1893. Following its runaway success, he made posters advertising each successive issue of the magazine for over seven years. Magazine readers and poster collectors celebrated his designs for their boldness, abstraction, and occasional comic touch. Penfield also created advertisements and cover designs for books published by Harper and Brothers.

As the most acclaimed artist working for Harper’s, Penfield was free to experiment with avant-garde styles. Less concerned with the dramatic curving lines of Art Nouveau than his contemporaries, Penfield synthesized a number of stylistic sources in his work, including Japanese ukiyo-e prints and posters made by contemporary French and British artists. Penfield’s work for Harper’s displays a late nineteenth-century American type—the wealthy and well-appointed middle-class individual enjoying leisure time. Penfield himself was part of this newly emerging middle class.

This poster features a caricatural image of an African American man, which echoes the racial misrepresentations found throughout Thomas Nelson Page’s written work. A frequent contributor to Harper’s Magazine, Page popularized a genre of writing that idealized life in the South before the Civil War, creating a revisionist portrait that set the stage for such landmark narratives as Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind. Page was born at Oakland, one of his family’s plantations in Virginia, and his childhood was interrupted by the brutal Civil War, in which his relatives lost all of their wealth and power. The writer’s nostalgic fantasies—often describing enslaved persons as contentedly working for beloved masters—filled the pages of Harper’s and were frequently published as book collections.