Dec 05, 2017 - Sale 2464

Sale 2464 - Lot 10

Price Realized: $ 2,250
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
BACHMANN, JOHN. The Seat of War at the West -- Bird's Eye View of Junction of the Ohio & Mississippi Rivers, Showing Cairo and Part of the Southern States. Tinted lithograph on wove paper, 19x24 inches sheet size, wide margins; light staining with a few closed tears in margins, horizontal soft crease across image, blindstamp of publisher A. Rumpf at center below title. New York: A. Rumpf, 1861
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Bachmann perfected the art of the "bird's eye view" early in his career; indeed "No finer artist of city views worked in America than John Bachmann" (Reps). In 1861 he published a series comprising six elevated perspective topographies of the Confederate States titled "Panorama of the Seat of War." A lithograph from this series, "Kentucky and Tennessee Showing Cairo and Part of the Southern States" presents that region and also depicts the major Union victory at Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River.

The present panorama is an earlier version of that Kentucky and Tennessee lithograph, smaller in size, but both were apparently created from the same stone, being extended at the top and left sides with a change to the title in the latter form. There is no action in the region of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, nor has Fort Donelson or Fort Henry even been built. What Bachmann illustrates here is a region on the eve of the U.S. Civil War, fraught with the anticipation of becoming a key center of river access to the western expanses of the Confederacy. The view is centered on Cairo, Illinois and is curiously oriented, following the course of the Mississippi River beyond its confluence with the Ohio south towards Memphis. Rare with OCLC locating only four copies and no record of its ever making an appearance on the market. Reps, Views and Viewmakers page 160; Stevenson, Civil War Maps (1989) 1.5, 23.5.