Landscape

The son of a self-taught painter, Penfold began exhibiting his paintings in 1872 at the Buffalo Academy of Fine Arts. He came to Paris in 1876 and first stayed in Brittany from 1876 to 1877, travelling through the region from Vitre to Pont-Aven. Penfold painted in the realist tradition of Robert Wylie’s generation. In 1884, he studied under Boulanger and Lefebvre at the Academie Julien. Following a return to the States in 1902, he sold the contents of his Buffalo studio at auction and moved permanently to Pont-Aven, where he directed the Academie Julia summer art school and built a studio with a good view of the port. He is buried in Pont-Aven cemetery. This triptych depicting a woodland scene is from the former Pension Gloanec