New Inventory

The engraver of Jeremiah Dobbs' 1794 New York Cooper's Society Membership Certificate engraves his name "Rollinson Delt. et Sct." This signature compares with William Rollinson's signature on documented American works in 1791, 1792 and 1796. Examples of these works are published in facsimile by his 1931 biographers and exist in institutional collections.¹ The Jeremiah Dobbs New York Cooper's Society Membership Certificate of July 7, 1794 is a newly discovered, early American pictorial engraving by William Rollinson, highly regarded in his lifetime as an American silversmith, artist and copper plate engraver.² This engraving is a complex and highly symbolic work of...

The Georgia Plan (1808) and the Sturges/Bohlen Archive (1795-1808) are a remarkable set of newly discovered historic documents centering on Georgia and Philadelphia that personalize Georgia's complex land accession and land survey history, and highlight major land fraud schemes of  1795 to 1808.  Sturges' Georgia Plan (1808) and the Sturges/Bohlen Archive are first person reminders of America's fraught creation myth, and highlight the competing forces of private investment in land, mercantile speculation, government channeling of such forces and the role of the courts, all with provocative relevance for the unfolding American story. [19]

For clarity, this complex lot is presented...

 This Album is a six year slice of life along the Connecticut River only 50 years after the American Revolution that reflects contact with America's foremost institutions, America's early 19th c. intellectual activists, educators, abolitionists, free thinkers, and artists  - including the deaf painter Augustus Fuller, Catherine E. Beecher, Thomas Gallaudet, religious thinkers and relationships in the personal life of Gratia Denny, an extraordinary individual. Gratia Denny, at the age of 28, set out from Leicester, Massachusetts in 1826 and traveled by stage coach and river boat (there were no trains) with her youngest brother, Edwards W. Denny (also known...

Alexander Hesler (1823 – 1895), the American photographer based in Chicago, Illinois took this photograph of Abraham Lincoln when he was a candidate for President of the United States.   Hesler had Lincoln sit for this portrait in Hesler's Chicago studio in 1860.

The contents of Hesler's studio, including the glass negative for this print were purchased in 1867 by George B. Ayres (1829-1905). On the back of this photograph, on the secondary support, is the manuscript inscription " Copyright Geo. B. Ayres Phila."  The platinum print was made by George B. Ayres and signed on the back.

The platinum print process...

The scene drawn by Edward Savage of Liberty as the Goddess of Youth offering sustenance from her golden goblet to the American Bald Eagle as he descends from backlit clouds captures the moment in American history when the new nation is being born. Drawn in the sky above Liberty and the Bald Eagle, emerging from smoke and clouds is the new American flag with thirteen stars, a cloth liberty cap atop the flagstaff. Beneath Liberty's bare right foot are the abandoned implements of royal tyranny, the massive Key to the Bastille prison, a royal insignia and scattered nearby are pieces...

This hand drawn student work, signed and dated inside a wreath of floral branches "ROXBURY Free School Febr. 8th, 1800, Abraham S. Fox Scripsit." is both a tribute and a mourning piece to the recently deceased President George Washington a scant six weeks after the President's death.  Abraham S. Fox dedicates this drawing to his teacher "To the Preceptor" in the lower right corner. Perhaps this work was a classroom exercise. The hand drawn tribute predates the nationally declared day of mourning, February 22, 1800 and may therefore have been an assignment in anticipation of that day or a student's...

This scarce, early 19th century engraving shows the naval battle at Plattsburgh, New York in 1814, the concluding and decisive American naval victory of the War of 1812 between America and Britain. The battle was momentous. Lake Champlain offered the British Navy a potential naval gateway from Canada into America. Lake Champlain would have provided the British Navy with water access via a short portage to Lake George and further south via the Champlain Canal to the Hudson River. Once setting sail on the Hudson River, Captain Downie could have led the British Navy directly to lay siege to New...