International studio (48.1913)

The Wonder of Work on the Panama Canal

villages, are all subjects. Subjects without end,
maybe only for me, but for me there they were.
Panama City is as picturesque as a Spanish city,
and as full of character; it has yet to be litho-
graphed, etched, or drawn. There are churches,
courtyards, balconied streets, forts, shops, gardens
—all awaiting the artist who has not yet come,
though, as I have said, he is on the way. I wonder
Whistler made no record of them on that un-
explained trip of his across the Isthmus. But I
went to draw the Canal; I had no time for any-
thing else, though some of the vistas under the
royal palms on Ancon Hill, looking down on the
town, the Pacific beyond, are as fine as the Bay of
Naples. And from the sea Panama is very like
Naples.
But the Canal called me and I had scarce any
time for any of these motives.
In the Canal I found the subjects I wanted—•
subjects such as I shall never find again, and it
will always be a delight to me that I went—went
on my own initiative and not at any one’s bidding.
If my drawings have interested my own country
and countrymen, and others’ countries and country-
men, it is the greatest honour I could claim, and to
have done some little thing with, and for, great men
like those who have made the Canal, to have done
something to record what they have done is what
I went for—and to have interested them is far
more than I ever expected. I shall probably never
see the Canal again, but I have seen it and drawn
it—and that was worth doing, and I am glad I
went, for it is the most wonderful Wonder of
Work.
The problem was, however, to draw these
wonderful, stupendous subjects. I had, before
leaving Rome, from whence I came, settled my
method. It was to be lithography. I meant to
use it for two reasons—one, because I like it, and
thought I could get what I wanted more directly
with it; the second, because I felt almost sure
I could have my drawings printed in Panama—that
there would be a government lithographic office on
the Isthmus.
I took a large supply of paper—Scotch transfer-
paper made up into blocks by Cornelissen’s of
London—and bought a large supply of Korn’s
chalks in New York; a pocket-knife and a tee-
square completed my outfit for lithography. I had
also etching-plates and charcoal, water-colours and
pastels. But I trusted to lithography.
The first thing I found after I reached Panama
was that there was no government lithographic
press, no printer; and I do not know if there is
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one in the Republic of Panama; that, therefore, if
I could make the drawings, they must remain on
the paper till I got to New York or San Francisco.
As a matter of fact they were not put on the stone
for nearly three months after, at Messrs. Ketterlinus’s
in Philadelphia, and not until after I had carried
them some six thousand miles through hot and
cold, damp and dry. Every authority on litho-
graphy wrote me that I would never get any results
after such treatment of the drawings—that they
would never transfer—that they would all be stuck
together in a solid block—and I don’t know what
other awful things. I was pretty well certain myself
that they were done for, at least, if any one of the
prophets was right. So in the first place I had
some of those I did not care much for—which
I had succeeded less well with—photographed, so
as to preserve some record ; then I went to work
at them with the printer, Mr. Gregor, every single
one of them being transferred to stone, and, for me,
Senefelder’s prophecy, that for artists the most
important part of his discovery was the method oj
drawing on paper, was realised. I did this trans-
ferring first in the manner in which it is done by
Way in London. A little later, however, I tried the
method of Goulding—the method, incredible as it
sounds, by which you extract the grease from the
paper, and transfer it to the stone, while the carbon,
or whatever it is, remains on the paper. The artist
by this method has his drawing and his print both.
But I, or rather we—the printer, Mr. Gregor,
and I—have discovered through these drawings
something that Senefelder never thought of, that
the same drawing can be transferred any number
of times from the same original, and in this way my
pilgrimage to Panama has been of technical value.
As to making the drawings, the block kept the
paper flat and in the windy gusty weather this -was
much. I used Korn’s Blaisdell pencils—the only
form of chalk I could have used without a crayon-
holder, which I hate—for in the heat the chalk—
the copal—got as soft as crayon estompe in my
fingers. In fact the drawings were nearly all done
with copal or number four. What they looked like
can be seen in the prints, for every print in litho-
graphy is an original. For illustrative purposes
lithographs are most useful, as they reproduce
perfectly, and did in this case. There is nothing
special to remember or to learn about lithographic
drawing, and it is quite a good thing to forget some
of the things you are told. But after all, the subject
was the thing, and I found the greatest subjects in
the Wonder of Work on the Panama Canal.
Joseph Pennell