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

State-House Garden, Philadelphia

Pennsylvania: W. Birch, Springland Cot, near Neshaminy Bridge on the Bristol Road, 1798. Hand-coloured copper engraving on laid paper. Sheet size: 14 x 17 inches.

Plate 23 from the very rare first American colour-plate book, with views that are "uniquely valuable among American historical prints" (Martin Snyder).

This plate shows the enclosed garden behind the Pennsylvania State House, later Independence Hall, with its high brick wall, open gateway, shaded walks, and strolling figures. Birch presents the garden as a civic and social landscape, a place where public architecture, leisure, and republican urban life meet. The composition is animated by small groups of men, women, and children, with the State House precinct partly screened by trees and the monumental entrance framing the scene. The State House Yard, also known as State House Garden and later Independence Square, had been set aside in the eighteenth century as a public green and walk. It is one of the earliest public gardens in America, laid out in the mid 1780s in a naturalistic English style with American trees. Birch's view preserves this designed landscape at the close of the eighteenth century, before the nineteenth century remaking of Independence Square as a national commemorative site. 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 23).

Item #42956

Price: $1,520.00