Sketchbook

by Oddie, Walter Meigs (1807 or 1808 - 1865) and Henry Meigs (1782-1861)

$25,000 · Offered by Biblio

New York City, 1828. Hardcover. Cloth spine. Marbled pastedown on boards. Leather centerpiece label on front board. Good. Original watercolors of rural Manhattan as it appeared in 1828. Among these, and captioned, are a farmhouse on Broadway and 8th Street; Kips Bay, showing a boy sailing a small craft with a farmhouse in the background; a house in Bloomingdale, the location of an early village now the Upper West Side along the river between 96th and 106th Streets; and a stately mansion surrounded by fields and less important buildings we would conjecture in or around Bloomingdale but captioned, surely incorrectly, the Battery. Most of the paintings are uncaptioned. Of these, some are surely the Upper Hudson area, or are scenes that we can't tell whether they are upstate or in the present day city. The artist also ventured away from the New York areas. Among the non-New York paintings are a depiction of the Cape Pogue Lighthouse on Martha's Vineyard, which still stands; Fowey Harbour, which is in Cornwall; and a few scenes which look very much like Scotland. Oblong, 14 by 19.5 cm. 55 watercolors, generally fully finished. Although the sketchbook has a label on its front board bearing the name of Walter Oddie, who was a listed artist, we believe a good amount of the artwork contained in this sketchbook is of his father-in-law, Henry Meigs. Meigs had been a U.S. Congressman from New York and also held a number of other political positions in the city over the course of his care

• Year: 1828
• Binding: hardcover

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