Heap, George & Scull, Nicholas "An East Prospect of the City of Philadelphia; taken by George Heap from the Jersey Shore, under the Direction of Nicholas Scull Surveyor General of the Province of Pennsylvania”

George Heap and Nicholas Scull.  "An East Prospect of the City of Philadelphia; taken by George Heap from the Jersey Shore, under the Direction of Nicholas Scull Surveyor General of the Province of Pennsylvania."

London: Thomas Jefferys, [1756]-1768. Second state.  Engraving by Thomas Jefferys.  19 3/4 x 36 7/8 (platemarks) plus small border all around.  Hand color in sky and partial in image of fort.  Four vertical folds with a slight separation in one fold at bottom. Repaired three inch tear into image upper left hand side. Irregular shape loss of paper, 1 ¾ x 1, bottom right under image of the State House and another irregular shape loss of paper, 2 ½ x 1, in the map to the left of Schuylkill River; both expertly filled.  Surface wear to numerous areas of the print which shows evidence of silver fish damage, though not overly affecting the quality of the image.  Print has been professionally conserved and archivally framed with UV filtering glass.  Overall, good condition.  Extremely scarce.  Snyder, City of Independence, 18A; Jay T. Snider Collection, 87.  A/A   

This 1756 printing of George Heap’s “East Prospect” is known as “the contracted” version (see Snyder, City of Independence, pp. 45-47).  The 1754 version was so big that it was printed on four separate sheets, and more important, people objected to the large size as unmanageable.  This smaller version added scenery on the New Jersey shore because Philadelphians wanted to project the image of an inland port.  This printing is a second state because the name of Nicholas Scull is corrected from the first state which spelled his name “Skull” and most likely dates from the 1760s.  The same desire influenced providing a plan of the city showing both sides of the river as well as the battery and the most important and prestigious building, the Statehouse.  Snyder states that 300 copies of the print were produced in total and that additional copies would have been printed for Thomas Jeffery’s General Topography of North America and the West Indies (London, 1768), a large composite atlas which is now quite scarce.  A fine and very rare artifact of colonial Philadelphia.