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| BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM H. BARTLETT |
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William Henry Bartlett, who lived from 1809 to 1854, was a well-known British topographical illustrator who was trained to create drawings that would result in clear steel-plate engravings. He traveled to America in 1836 to draw buildings, urban scenes, and the landscapes of the northeastern states.
His engravings capture a particular moment in the history of the United States. For example, they display the new settlement that followed the War of 1812, immediately before the brick factories of the industrial revolution began to change the nature of American cities. They also chronicle the beginning of the Westward Movement, with the West being the western areas of New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Originally these engravings fascinated people because they documented both a new civilization and a totally different landscape. For the population of Britain and continental Europe, these engravings offered the view of a new world, full of social promise as well as natural beauty.
A set of 119 hand-colored engravings of American scenery were originally published by Virtue in London in monthly installments from 1837 to 1840. The engravings were accompanied with a text written by N. P. Willis who traveled with William Bartlett. Bound editions of this work were published in French and German editions, as well as the original English, from 1840 onward. In the test that accompanied the 1840 bound edition of Bartlett's engravings N.P. Willis wrote of the American:
"He sees a valley laden down like a harvest wagon with virgin vegetation, untrodden and luxuriant; and his first thought is of the villages that will soon sparkle on the hill-sides, the axes that will ring from the woodlands, and the mills, bridges, canals, and railroads, that will span and boarder the stream that now runs through sedge and wildflowers."
When these views were published in London, their popularity prompted the Staffordshire Pottery Company to use them as transfer patterns on their blue and white ceramics. In America itself, the romantic perspective of these landscapes was soon to influence the important Hudson River school of painting. Now these finely detailed and exquisitely colored engravings fascinate us because they document a world that no longer exists, and they prompt our imagination to see in our present urban sites and rural landscapes the traces of that moment when America was in its infancy.
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