People We Pass - Edward Penfield

Penfield's poster for People We Pass, a work of urban observation focused on the characters encountered in everyday city life. The image likely depicts one or more of these passing figures in Penfield's simplified graphic style.

Historical context

The late 19th century saw a boom in literary "city sketches," short portraits of urban types and street scenes. Writers like Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, and O. Henry all worked in this genre, documenting the diversity and energy of American city life for a readership that found the modern city both fascinating and bewildering. The genre's appeal lay in making sense of urban anonymity: turning strangers into characters, giving faces and stories to the crowd.

Penfield's poster advertises a book in this tradition, using his visual economy to capture the same fleeting encounters that the author records in prose. His flat-colour, single-figure approach is particularly well suited to the concept of "people we pass," since each of his poster figures is essentially a stranger caught mid-stride, a character seen for a moment and then gone. The poster format mirrors the book's subject: a glimpse of someone you will never see again.

About Edward Penfield (1866–1925)

Often called the father of the American poster, Penfield served as art director of Harper's Magazine from 1890 to 1901, producing over 100 cover designs during that period. His style drew on Japanese woodblock printing and the French affiche tradition: flat areas of colour, bold outlines, and minimal detail. He became one of the most recognised illustrators of the American Art Nouveau movement, and his wartime posters remain some of the most widely studied examples of early 20th-century graphic propaganda.

This fine art reproduction is printed on museum-grade stock, faithful to the original's bold colours and graphic simplicity.