Collections record Beta

Collection Record Detail

Object Name

Sketch

Object Number

2012-69-1

Description

Charcoal sketch. Total of five buildings present, each with light-white faces and darkened rooftops. Chimneys rest on the roofs of three buildings. Buildings have steps leading from door to ground. Ground has lines to resemble grass and stones as well. Lower left corner, above signature, has about seven long stone/log type shapes forming a half circle around the corner. A lantern hangs on building on right side of sketch in the middle. Two people also present in center of sketch. They are at a water pump. One is standing and facing the other who is slightly bent over and holding a bucket. One bucket already rests underneath the pump.

Comment

Albert Sheldon Pennoyer was born in Oakland, California, on April 5, 1888. He studied briefly at the University of California moving to Paris in 1912 to study architecture. The following year he gave up architecture and instead took up painting and studied at the Académie Julian and Académie de la Grand Chaumiére. He returned to the United States at the onset of World War I, and served from 1917 to 1920 in the camouflage unit of the Army Corps of Engineers, and then from 1920 to 1928 in the Officers’ Reserve Corp. In 1921, Pennoyer set up a studio in New York City where he would work at regular intervals for the next thirty-eight years. Pennoyer also spent large amounts of time at his mother’s home in Litchfield, producing Connecticut landscapes in pastel and oil and multiple scenes of Litchfield, both past and present. Pennoyer served again in World War II, first with the U.S. Army Air Force and the Corps of Engineers before joining the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA, better known as the Monuments Men). Given a Leica camera, a car, and a driver, Pennoyer was involved in the repair, recovery, and documentation of cultural heritage in Italy from 1943-1945. Pennoyer assisted in the recovery and return of artwork evacuated from public collections by Italian officials and storage in safer repositories in the Tuscan countryside. His photographs document the work of the MFAA, the destruction of monuments and buildings caused by German occupation and allied bombing, and the physical and emotional toll felt by the residents.