Dec 09, 2021 - Sale 2591

Sale 2591 - Lot 388

Price Realized: $ 1,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,000
(NEW YORK CITY.) William James Bennett; after John William Hill. New York from Brooklyn Heights. Large hand-colored aquatint and engraved view of lower Manhattan across the East River. Printed on India paper and mounted to heavy stock, 24 1/4x35 inches sheet size, wide margins; conserved but showing a light mat tone. New York: L.P. Clover, 1837 [but after]
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Additional Details

"This stunning aquatint was conceived through the combined efforts of two of the most talented participants in nineteenth-century American printmaking circles: the young John William Hill (he was twenty-four years old at the time) and the master aquatint engraver William James Bennett. While maintaining undisputed harmony in the wide pictorial world he has constructed, Hill presents five different topographic spheres: a scene in Brooklyn, nautical activity on the East River, the dense settlement of Manhattan, the Hudson River, and the far-off shores of New Jersey. This he has done innovatively, without reference to the conventional devices of a foreground landscape, coulisse trees, or other border elements traditionally used in achieving a compact, pleasing design. ...The copperplate that resulted from the collaboration of Hill and Bennett is still in existence. It was found at the turn of the twentieth century in the old establishment of Currier and Ives, where it had long served as a floor plate under a stove. As the sky was badly damaged, it was burnished out of the plate" -- Deak, Picturing America, 463.