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HILL, John (1770-1850, engraver) & William Guy Wall (1792-1864)
Newburg. No. 14 of the Hudson River Port Folio.
New York: Henry J. Megarey, [1825]. Aquatint, coloured by hand, by John Hill after W. G. Wall. Printed on fine wove paper. In good condition except for small expert repairs to blank margins, and one 2 1/2 inch repaired tear affecting the title, outside the image. Sheet size: 17 5/8 x 23 1/4 inches.
An excellent example of one of the greatest and earliest American printed landscapes
This is a superb example of the art of aquatint landscape by John Hill, giving the impression of a carefully executed watercolor with its contrasts of dark and light, contrasts of shape and texture, of high and low, land and river, earth and sky. The dark, jagged profile of the pine trees, the silvery bright, reflective river and the calm, gray hills on the opposite shore receding into the distance form an evocative scene. The road descending into shadow leads us to a perception of Nature as a being that is reaching up toward the sky at the same time it is pulling inward toward the center.
"The Hudson River Portfolio, a series of twenty views...celebrates the beauty of the Hudson and its surroundings. It is amongst the finest collections of New York State views ever published...The aquatints show us the region of the Hudson's headwaters, the rapids it creates on its journey downstream, the bridges it makes imperative overhead, the trade that its navigability spawns, and, most of all, the ennobling topographic settings through which it passes. In the final view, New York from Governor's Island, we see the Hudson at the end of its journey, where it joins the East River in New York Bay...William Guy Wall...was a native of Dublin who came to America in 1818...Beginning in 1826, he exhibited frequently at the National Academy of Design...[He was skillful with atmospheric perspective in his landsacpes, and he created almost spiritual effects with light, at a time when viewers were used to literal depictions. Between 1828 and 1835 he remained in America, but then returned to Dublin for twenty years. He came back to America for four years between 1856 and 1860, before again returning in Ireland where he lived for the remaining four years of his life] Wall frequently worked in tandem with John Hill, whose emigration from England predated that of Wall by two years...According to Koke, 'the artistic achievement for which Hill is best known...was the Hudson River Portfolio, a landscape series closely akin to the Picturesque Views of American Scenery recently finished for the Careys' (John Hill Master of Aquatint, p.86)...Hill, an aquatintist virtually without peer in America, was called in to fill the place vacated by John Rubens Smith, who dissociated himself from the Portfolio before he finished engraving the four plates of the first number...Hill belonged to a small group of English-trained engravers who raised the level of American print-making to an extraordinary degree" (Deak, pp. 217-218).
First state of 2.
Koke, A Checklist #92; Deak, Picturing America #320
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#17019 $7,000.00 
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© 2002-2005 Donald A. Heald
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