Bidspirit auction | James David Smillie & Edward

James David Smillie & Edward Paxman Brandard - Old Steel Engraving Print - Telegraph Hill - Golden Gate - Picturesque America. Antique steel engraving originates from the book ”Picturesque America”. Picturesque America was a two-volume set of books describing and illustrating the scenery of America, which grew out of an earlier series in Appleton's Journal. It was published by D. Appleton and Company of New York in 1872 and 1874 and edited by the romantic poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), who also edited the New York Evening Post. The work's essays, together with its nine hundred wood engravings and fifty steel engravings, are considered to have had a profound influence on the growth of tourism and the historic preservation movement in the United States. The volumes display both steel and wood engravings based on the paintings of some of the best American landscape painters of the nineteenth century, primarily Harry Fenn and his friend Douglas Woodward, but also including John Frederick Kensett, William Stanley Haseltine, James David Smillie, John William Casilear, Thomas Moran, etcetera. Engravers included Robert Hinshelwood, Edward Paxman Brandard, Samuel Valentine Hunt, William Wellstood, William Chapin, Henry Bryan Hall.