Biography from Hope Davis Fine Art:
| Edmund Birckhead Bensell was born in Philadelphia and graduated from
the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He actively exhibited at
the Philadelphia Academy, the Artist's Fund Society, and the
Philadelphia Sketch Club, of which he was one of the original six
founders. He and his artist brother, George Bensell, fostered the
enthusiastic feeling at the Club for anti-slavery and painted banners
for the Negro headquarters. He also helped illustrate William
Still's book, The Underground Rail Road.
Bensell is best
known for his pen and ink drawings, most notably for the forty
illustrations of Shakespeare made for the publisher Charles F.
Hazeltine. Bensell also illustrated for Scribner & Sons,
Lippincott & Co., J.M. Stoddard & Co., and Harper &
Bros. Among his illustrated books are Ting-A-Ling by Frank
Stockton, The Vicar of Bullhampton by Anthony Trollope, and Memoirs of
a Good-For-Nothing by Charles Godfrey Leland.
His brother, George Frederick Bensell (1837-1879), was also a painter and illustrator.
Sources include:
William Patterson & David Zellin, Thomas Eakins and His Fellow Artists at the Philadelphia Sketch Club
Sinclair Hamilton, Early American Book Illustrators and Wood Engravers; Courtesy Sidney Hamper, President of the Vanderpoel Art Association
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