William Charles Penn

William Charles Penn was born in 1877; his exact birth date and birthplace are not documented in the sources reviewed. He trained at the Lambeth School of Art and the City and Guilds Schools of Art from 1895, winning medals there, and then held a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools from 1900 to 1905. He later studied at the Academie Julian in Paris in 1908. From 1911 until after the Second World War he taught at the Liverpool School of Art, where Art UK describes him as an influential teacher. He joined the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 1908 and was elected to the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 1952. He exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, and in the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions, though the specific years of those showings are not recorded in the sources consulted. He died in 1968 in Brampton, Cumberland.

It is worth stating plainly that this painter is a different person from William Penn, the English Quaker leader who lived from 1644 to 1718 and founded the colony that became Pennsylvania. That William Penn is not documented as a visual artist; he appears at auction as the subject or signatory of historical documents and portraits, not as their maker. Any record of "William Penn" in an art-market context should be checked against the fuller name William Charles Penn, and against the signature form Will. C. Penn that appears on his paintings, to avoid conflating the two men.

Contemporary, named critical commentary in major outlets was not located for William Charles Penn. Art UK, the reference database for artists represented in UK public collections, carries a brief descriptive entry on him, but no specific phrasing from that entry could be confirmed for direct quotation here. Beyond that database entry, the surviving record is built mainly from institutional facts: his teaching post at Liverpool, his memberships in the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and the Walker Art Gallery's holding of several of his works, rather than from a developed body of published criticism.

No confirmed all-time auction price for a work by William Charles Penn appears in the sources reviewed for this profile. A signed oil painting, The picnic (1921), signed Will. C. Penn, has passed through Christie's, which confirms that his work does circulate in the secondary market, but no sale total for that lot or any other was available to verify as of 2026-07-16. Given this, the honest description of his market is that it is thinly documented rather than large or small in a measurable sense.

There is no catalogue raisonne, no certificate-of-authenticity program, and no current gallery or estate representation identified for William Charles Penn, so attribution relies on the artist's own signature and on cataloguing by auction houses such as Christie's. The clearest institutional anchor for his work is the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, which holds several examples. Because his name is easily confused with the much more famous historical William Penn, anyone researching a work attributed to "William Penn" should confirm whether the piece is signed Will. C. Penn or otherwise tied to William Charles Penn the painter, rather than to the seventeenth-century Quaker founder of Pennsylvania.