Back of State House, Philadelphia (Engraving)

Back of the State House, Philadelphia. W. Birch and Son, 1799

Artist/Maker: William Birch (1755-1834) and Thomas Birch (1779-1851), artists and engravers, with Samuel Seymour (active 1796-1823), engraver, and William Barker (active 1795-1803), engraver 

Created: 1799 (engravings executed 1798-1800, published December 31, 1800)

Origin/Purchase: Philadelphia

Materials: From The City of Philadelphia, in the State of Pennsylvania, North America; as it appeared in the Year 1800 — folio containing engraved map of the city of Philadelphia,  hand-colored line-engraved frontispiece and 28 plates

Dimensions: 27.9 × 33 (11 × 13 in.)

Provenance: Dr. Milton A. and Joan P. Wohl; by gift to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation in 1992

Accession Number: 1991-29

Historical Notes: William Birch's monumental publication The City of Philadelphia captured the vibrant capital as Jefferson knew it during his vice presidency (1797-1801). Birch and his son Thomas immigrated to Philadelphia from England in 1794, and in 1798 they produced their first engravings for the series. Birch's twenty-nine scenes of the city were innovative in their high level of detail, which conveyed a cross-section of city life. New vantage points for familiar sites, evident in the three plates of the Statehouse, set Birch's work apart.^[1]

The collection was published on the last day of 1800 and celebrated Philadelphia's progress over the preceding century. In his introduction, Birch wrote of the city:

The ground on which it stands, was less than a century ago, in a state of wild nature; covered with wood, and inhabited by Indians. It has in this short time, been raised, as it were, by magic power, to the eminence of an opulent city, famous for its trade and commerce, crouded in its port, with vessels of its own producing, and visited by others from all parts of the world. ... This Work will stand as a memorial of its progress for the first century; the buildings, of any consequence, are generally included, and the street scenes all accurate as they now stand; the choice of subjects are those that give the most general idea of the town ....^[2]

Jefferson was among the 156 original subscribers to the work, which ranged in price from $28 for an uncolored, unbound copy to $44.50 for a colored, bound copy.^[3] Other subscribers included Gilbert Stuart and the architect Latrobe, whose Philadelphia Waterworks and Bank of Pennsylvania were represented. According to Birch, Jefferson prominently displayed his bound copy of The City of Philadelphia in the President's House:

During the whole of [Jefferson's] presidency it layed on the sophia in his visiting Room at Washington till it became ragged and dirty, but was not suffered to be taken away.^[4]

Once he returned to Monticello, Jefferson kept the folio outside of his library.^[5] In 1815 he sold Birch's City of Philadelphia, along with most of his library, to help form the Library of Congress. It was likely destroyed in the 1851 fire that devastated the Library.^[6]

- Text from Stein, Worlds, 186

Further Sources

• Teitelman, S. Robert, ed.  Birch's Views of Philadelphia: A reduced Facsimile of The City of Philadelphia ... as it appeared in the Year 1800: With Photographs of the Sites in 1960 & 2000 and Commentaries.  Philadelphia: Free Library of Philadelphia, 2000.