The work of our early American
engravers makes a useful guide to the past, showing us not only what cities
and towns looked like, but also what New Englanders in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries thought was important.
Boston was the first city to challenge engravers' ingenuity. The earliest detailed map of Boston, engraved by John Bonner in 1722, became the model for many that were drawn after it. After Bonner died in 1726, William Price reprinted the map several times and modified it to show the growth and physical changes Boston enjoyed over the next forty-three years. John Carwitham used Bonner's outline when he drew a detailed three-dimensional scene in the later 1720s.
As time passed, these scenes were changed in two ways: their presentation of Boston showed the rising prosperity of the port and the method of etching changed. The first pictures of Boston were woodcuts, in which the engraver carved the scene on soft wood. Such wood etchings are often less well detailed and could be used to make only a limited number of prints before they began to wear out. Later, illustrators made their pictures using the
new technology of copper plate engraving which used acid to eat away the
areas around the drawing. These engravings could have sharper lines and
more details; they could also be used to strike many more prints than woodcuts,
thus making them better for commercial printing.
set a precedent for how later engravers would present the State House, now the Old State House, in Boston.  The
building's various presentations during the early nineteenth century suggest
a further shift as Boston had moved away from colonial dependency. In its
new era of relative urban maturity, Boston felt a self-sufficiency and
independence from direct national and state control. This new attitude
shows up in the engravings.
Abel Bowen's engravings of the "Old State House" appeared in print several times until 1825. But the building becomes "City Hall," reflecting the recently-won city charter and independence from state government, in works printed throughout the 1830s. By 1842, Barber refers to it as the "Old City Hall" in Massachusetts Historical Collections, because the new City Hall had been completed in 1841. During this time, engravers
continued to experiment with both wood and copper plate After its completion in 1795, Charles Bulfinch's
New State House became a symbol of national and state pride. Bowen's original
view of the State House, which presented it as an imposing edifice towering
over Beacon Hill and dominating the Common below, was so popular that it
appeared in three different histories of Boston and was copied for a fourth
in 1838.
House was a wood engraving. Within a few years he would turn to the copper plate process in his depictions of what was by then known as City Hall. Below, This rendition of the State House, which appeared
 Another emblem of Boston's political and economic influence is Faneuil Hall, built in 1741 and enlarged in 1805. In 1789, to illustrate its importance, an engraving in Massachusetts Magazine exaggerated its size and increased the area of empty space around it. When Bowen made a copper engraving of the expanded marketplace in 1825, he placed it in relation to the newly constructed Quincy Market complex along the waterfront. Later representations of this commercial area presented Faneuil Hall at the center of a busy commercial intersection or accentuated Quincy Market's length as it stretched along the harbor.
Illustrations of other public buildings show changes in the social consciousness of New England cities starting in the second quarter of the century. The impulse to care for the mentally ill is portrayed in three widely separated cities. Bowen's engraving of Boston's new Insane Hospital was made for an 1825 history. An etching of Hartford's Retreat for the Insane appears in Barber's Connecticut Historical Collections of 1836. Augusta, Maine's Insane Hospital is presented in Coolidge and Mansfield's 1859 History of New England, General and Local. As a growing number of communities secured city
charters, they became the subject of engravings. Bridgeport Connecticut's
long struggle for effective government, first as borough and then as town,
ended with city status in l836; that year, Barber published a cityscape
of the new municipality. In 1838, Barber added engravings of Lowell and
Salem to his Massachusetts Historical Collections. Later cityscape
engravings were made of other new municipalities: Portland and Bangor,
Maine; and Providence, Rhode Island. Coolidge and Mansfield's 1859 History
contained engravings by many noted artists depicting municipalities in
both New Hampshire and Maine.
By the 1850s, a new type of building was being included in illustrations: the fashionable homes along Beacon Hill and the newly reclaimed areas of Back Bay. Along with these came depictions of wealthy inhabitants riding in carriages or walking about in finery. Depictions of cities began to focus less on civic edifices and more on examples of contemporary material success. The work of engravers, then, in the century and
a half preceding the advent of photoreproduction, had changed considerably.
Their etchings had shown that urban communities had grown more prosperous
and more complex. Their treatment of subjects had reflected first patriotism,
then nationalism, and finally comfortable bourgeois refinement. Along the
way, they had developed and mastered progressively sophisticated techniques
from wood engraving through copper etching to complex photographically-assisted
lithography.
THE SEVERAL WAYS OF GETTING THE PICTURE Between the late seventeenth
and the early nineteenth centuries, New England printers adopted a succession
of methods for producing illustrations for the page. Employed in the seventeenth
century was the basic woodcut, a process involving the careful and
painstaking gouging on the soft, side grain of appropriate wood stocks.
Among the earliest surviving American woodcuts are a 1670 portrait of Richard
Mather (1596-1669), Dorchester minister and founder of the Massachusetts
Mather family, and a map by William Hubbard in his 1677 account of King
Philip's War.
A distinctly new mode of creating impressions, the mezzotint, followed in 1728, when Peter Pelham produced a portrait of Cotton Mather (1663-1728), son of Increase Mather and the controversial defender of orthodox Puritanism associated with both the Salem Witch Trials and the founding of Yale College. The mezzotint provided tones by the smoothing out of highlighted areas on a roughened metal plate. So far had the use of metal plate progressed that Abner Doolittle, a noted engraver, would drop the use of wood altogether after engraving on copper Ralph Earle's four views of the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. By the early 1800s New England engravers introduced a technique for softening the harshness that often resulted from metal engravings, the aquatint, which enabled the printer to achieve several tones by coating the copper plate and varying the etching time of different areas of the plate in the acid bath. The first aquatint in America, Edward Savages's The Action between the Constellation and L'Insurgent, appeared in 1798. Although Bass Otis in 1819 created the first lithograph in America, a mill scene for Atlantic Monthly, the first commercially successful lithographic house was not established until 1825 when William and John Pendleton set up their successful and so-to-be-imitated operations in Boston. In lithography the engraver had merely to draw on a prepared stone with a greasy crayon, soak the stone in water, and apply a greasy ink, which adhered to the design but was repelled by water. By the 1850s Daguerreotype pictures were being used as models for reproducing both engraved and lithographic portraits and scenes. The photograph was becoming, with increasing frequency, the initial step in publishing an illustration, although reproducing the photograph directly upon the printed page had not yet come into common practice. As demonstrated by Coolidge and Mansfield in 1859, the preparation of prints for publication had become quite sophisticated, each depiction requiring that the photographer or artist, delineator or draughtsman, engraver or sculptor be identified on the final print. Harold A. Pinkham, Jr., Professor Emeritus
of Salem State College, continues to study, write and teach in the field
of early American urban history. He is currently writing a book on New
England's early cities.
Further
Readings
Barber, John W. Connecticut Historical Collections, 1836.Harold A. Pinkham, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Salem State College, continues to study, write and teach in the field of early American Urban history. he is currently writing a book on New England's early cities. |
|||||||||||||
| Return to top of this page
Return to Vol. 4, no. 2 Table of Contents Return to Sextant Frontpage |
 |
||||||||||||
engraving.
Bowen's 1817 view was a wood engraving but his later versions were rendered
on copper plate. To create softer lines, more subtle tones and gradations
in shading, some engravers clung to wood; for durability, they cut the
polished end grain with the printed line cut in relief. Others achieved
a softer line on copper by using aquatint, a technique of coating the copper
plate and then varying the time that different areas of the plate were
subjected to the acid bath that etched in the design.
