A delicate portrayal of mid-nineteenth-century New York Harbour by the American landscape artist, J.W.C. Williams. While little is known of Williams - other than he was active in mid-nineteenth century - he painted other panoramas of New york Harbour: “New York Harbor from Williamsburg” in the same year as this, and “Lower Manhattan from Brooklyn” in 1850.
This panorama looks across New York Harbour and the Narrows, where the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge would later cross. Brooklyn is on the left and Staten Island on the right, with New Jersey in the distance. The locations named in the key are as follows: Long Island, Sandy Hook, Diamond Fort (later Fort Lafayette), the Narrows, Jersey Point, Telegraph, Staten Island.
A lithograph of this image, similarly titled and captioned, was published by Louis Auguste Turgis in New York and Paris in 1856. There is a slight difference between the two images: in the lithograph a sail boat has been added to the central foreground, presumably to give the image better balance. The lithograph itself is rare with no copies on OCLC, though we locate a copy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: accession no. 54.90.1446.
See the image of the lithograph for reference, but note that it is not included with the watercolour.
Kennedy Galleries, American Drawings, Pastels and Watercolors, Part Two (NY, 1968), vol. 2, p.25.
