BIRCH, William R. (1755-1834); Thomas BIRCH (1779-1851)

Goal in Walnut Street Philadelphia

Pennsylvania: W. Birch, Springland Cot, near Neshaminy Bridge on the Bristol Road, 1799. Hand-coloured copper engraving on laid paper. Sheet size: 14 x 17 inches.

Plate 24 from the very rare first American colour-plate book, with views that are "uniquely valuable among American historical prints" (Martin Snyder).

The view is titled for the "Goal," or gaol, on Walnut Street built between 1773 and 1776 from designs by Robert Smith. The jail became closely associated with early American prison reform. A rear penitentiary building, added in the early 1790s, was intended for solitary confinement and hard labour, part of the reform movement led by the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. Birch's composition, however, gives equal weight to another history. In the foreground, a team of horses draws a timber building through the street. The structure is understood to be a former blacksmith shop purchased by the Reverend Richard Allen and moved to Sixth and Lombard Streets, where it became the first home of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Mother Bethel was established in 1794 by Allen, a former enslaved man who purchased his freedom in 1783, became a leader of Philadelphia's African American community, and in 1816 became the first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The congregation remains on the land Allen purchased in the 1790s, one of the oldest parcels of real estate in the United States continuously owned by African Americans. The plate joins two central narratives of the early republic, penal reform in the shadow of the State House and Black religious self-determination in the founding generation of independent African American church life. Birch's street scene also preserves the everyday mechanics of the city, horses, handlers, bystanders, timber buildings, and civic architecture, giving the print the documentary density that made the Philadelphia views central to the visual history of the early American city. This plate is taken from the first and one of the most important of all American color plate books, the first book to be entirely produced and published in the United States. William Russell Birch, who conceived this splendid celebration of the city of Philadelphia, then the largest city in the United States, was a native of England. When he arrived in America in 1794, he brought with him a strong academic training in art which he used to found an engraving firm. Birch hoped that his carefully planned and executed portfolio would serve as an advertisement "by which an idea of the improvements of the country could be conveyed to Europe, to promote and encourage settlers to the establishment of trade and commerce."

Martin P. Snyder, "William Birch: His Philadelphia Views," in Pennsylvania Magazine of History, Vol. 73, No. 3, July 1949 (Snyder 24).

Item #42945

Price: $1,800.00