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

Old Lutheran Church, in Fifth Street Philadelphia

Pennsylvania: W. Birch, Springland Cot, near Neshaminy Bridge on the Bristol Road, 1800. Hand-coloured copper engraving on laid paper. Sheet size: 13 7/8 x 17 inches.

Plate 7 from the very rare first American colour-plate book, with views that are "uniquely valuable among American historical prints" (Martin Snyder).

The plate shows the Old Lutheran Church, St. Michael's, on Fifth Street, built in 1743-48 under the leadership of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg for Philadelphia's growing German-speaking Lutheran community. A second Lutheran church, Zion, was begun in 1769, and both congregations used the two buildings for the following century; St. Michael's was demolished in 1872. The scene shows Fifth Street with St. Michael's Church, animated by pedestrians, a carriage, and figures gathered near a tethered horse. Birch presents the church as part of the lived city, not simply as an architectural subject. The brick façade is partly screened by trees, while the foreground includes promenading couples, women in fashionable dress, a coach, dogs, and several small street-side groups. These details give the plate much of its historical value: it records a vanished eighteenth-century religious building and, at the same time, offers a view of Philadelphia's civic life at the moment when the city was leaving behind its decade as the temporary national capital. 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 7).

Item #42948

Price: $1,800.00