Harry Fenn

Who was Harry Fenn?

Harry Fenn was an English-born American illustrator, landscape painter, etcher, and wood engraver. From 1870 to around 1895 he was the most prominent landscape illustrator in the United States.

Fenn started as a wood engraver, apprenticing with the Dalziel firm in London, but soon turned to drawing for illustration and watercolor painting. In 1857 he made a trip to the U.S. in order to see the Niagara Falls, and settled in New York where he worked first as a wood engraver. In 1862 he married Marian Tompson of Brooklyn. After an extended wedding trip to England and Italy, where Fenn studied painting, his focused on illustration in New York.

He settled in Montclair, New Jersey around 1865. His first highly successful commission was to illustrate Whittier's Snow-Bound published by Boston's Ticknor and Fields in 1867 for the Christmas trade. It's tiny images apparently opened the eyes of many to the artistic possibilities of wood engravings, and it is often referred to as the "first gift book published in America," although this was not the case. Fenn is best known for the engravings he contributed to three massive books published by New York's D. Appleton and Co., filled with wood and steel engravings: Picturesque America edited by William Cullen Bryant, which started as a serial in Appletons' Journal" in 1870; Picturesque Europe, and Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt. Other artists contributed to each of these books, but Fenn was the most prolific contributor, and his innovative page designs combining image and text popularized this approach. Fenn and his family lived in England from 1873 to 1881 while Fenn worked on Picturesque Europe and "Picturesque Palestine".'