Birch, William R. and Thomas:

$165,000 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA, IN THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA NORTH AMERICA: AS IT APPEARED IN THE YEAR 1800 CONSISTING OF TWENTY-EIGHT PLATES DRAWN AND ENGRAVED BY W. BIRCH & ... The first edition of the first, and one of the most important, of all American color plate books. 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 at the age of thirty-nine, he brought with him a strong academic training in art with no less a master than Sir Joshua Reynolds. His talent and all his creative skills were put to good use in his adopted city, where he founded 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."Birch's idea was to present a series of plates which would illustrate notable buildings and characteristic scenes in his adopted city. From the beginning, he worked assiduously on the project he assigned himself, often rejecting drawings or reworking the copper plates when the printed impressions did not satisfy him. For the subject matter, there was no aspect of Philadelphia or of the vitality of its streets that he did not sweep into his embrace: the harbor; the grid plan of the streets; the ships and cargo that came into the

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