Penrhyn Stanlaws

American (1877-1957)

Born in Dundee, Scotland in 1877, painter, illustrator and writer Penrhyn Stanley Adamson adopted the pseudonym Penrhyn Stanlaws after immigrating to the United States in 1901. Stanlaws studied at Princeton University and at the Academie Julian in Paris under Benjamin Jean-Joseph Constant and J.P. Laurens. He returned to the United States in 1908 and established a studio in New York City where his illustrations of “Stanlaws Girls” graced the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, Town and Country, Collier’s, Life, The Metropolitan Magazine and Hearst’s International throughout the 1910’s and 1920’s. Highly successful, Stanlaws built the Hotel des Artistes in New York City which, at the time, was the largest studio building in the country.

Stanlaws was a member of the Society of Illustrators and Society of Independent Artists. He exhibited at the National Academy of Design, Art Institute of Chicago, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Society of Illustrators and Society of Independent Artists. He is credited as the director of seven silent motion picture films. Stanlaws’s works are held in the permanent collections of the Heckscher Park Art Museum in Huntington, New York and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California.