Print, Woodcut on Paper

A woodcut prepared by artist Charles R. Gardner in 1931 and commissioned as an advertising piece for the Pennsylvania Mutual Life Insurance Company. The work celebrates the first free flight from American soil. On January 9, 1793, the French aeronaut Jean Pierre Blanchard ascended from the yard of Philadelphia's "New Jail," the present site of the Penn Mutual home office. In 1943, on the 140th anniversary of the flight, Penn Mutual used this woodcut as the frontispiece for a book on the ascent, including a facsimile of Blanchard's original published account.