Joseph Pennell considered that all art was illustration and that he was a born illustrator. In a career that spanned more than half a century Pennell relentlessly, perhaps obsessively, but always elegantly illustrated what he termed the "Wonder of Work." His oeuvre includes more than nine hundred etchings, six hundred lithographs, and uncounted pen drawings, charcoals, watercolors, and pastels of architectural views as varied as the locks of the Panama Canal, the Alhambra, the stockyards of Chicago, the temples of Greece, the great munitions plants of wartime England, Federalist houses in Philadelphia, French cathedrals, and the first skyscrapers of New York City.

As well as being an extraordinary draftsman, Pennell was a gifted writer with a big, forceful voice and a colorful, incisive wit. As an art critic in London during the 1890s, his bluntly opinionated columns earned him many enemies yet also helped to establish the careers...