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

State-House, with a View of Chesnut Street 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 21 from the very rare first American colour-plate book, with views that are "uniquely valuable among American historical prints" (Martin Snyder).

The subject was still known as the Pennsylvania State House when Birch drew it, although it would later become Independence Hall. It is identified as the site where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 and where the United States Constitution was created and signed in 1787. Birch's image records the site before its nineteenth-century transformation into a shrine of national memory: the street is quiet, the architecture civic and functional, and the view remains embedded in the daily fabric of late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Birch's treatment is also valuable as an urban document. The State House fronts Chestnut Street, with its wings and neighbouring government buildings forming a compact civic ensemble. Birch's plate looks east down Chestnut Street, with the main hall at right, the arcade and wing partially visible, and Old City Hall beyond. The result is less a commemorative monument than a measured city view, combining architectural record, street life, and civic identity at the moment when Philadelphia was central to the political life of the early republic. 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 21).

Item #42957

Price: $2,000.00