Shaw, Joshua:

$2,250 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

VIEW ABOVE THE FALLS OF SCHUYLKILL. An important and scarce early American color print, based on a painting by Joshua Shaw, a British landscape artist who came to the United States in 1817. He conceived the idea of a published series of American views, which he executed over the next few years and which were published in Philadelphia as a series of nineteen plates entitled PICTURESQUE VIEWS OF AMERICAN SCENERY. The original edition of 1819 was issued by Moses Thomas and exists in only a few copies. The present plate is from the 1820 second issue published by Mathew Carey, also very rare.In this bucolic scene, a pair of river men in a small boat shove off from the bank at a wide point of the upper Schuykill River. In the distance, a few houses dot the farm land on the opposite side of the river, all beneath a partly-sunny, partly-cloudy sky.Complete sets of PICTURESQUE VIEWS... have appeared on the market only twice in the past fifty years and have brought in the neighborhood of $200,000 each time. Individual plates are somewhat less rare, but still very scarce on the market. A wonderful view of a verdant Pennsylvania.

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