Barralet, John James "View of the Water Works At Centre Square Philadelphia" [current site of City Hall]

John James Barralet (ca. 1747-1815).  “View of the Water Works At Centre Square Philadelphia.”  [current site of City Hall]

Philadelphia: H. Quig, ca. 1830+.  Fourth state.  11 3/4 x 20 1/8.  Stipple engraving by Cornelius Tiebout.  Lovely 19^th century hand color.  Several repaired short tears into image and margins.  One 11 3/4 inch vertical tear into image from bottom skillfully repaired so that its very difficult to see.  Narrow margins top and sides.  Light stain in bottom left hand margin.  Bottom right margin corner filled with matching paper.  Slight wave in paper.  Else, good condition.  Fowble: 286; Stauffer 3234, Snyder, 110.  

Centre Square, current site of City Hall, was one of the five original parks laid out in the Holme grid plan for Philadelphia.  In the eighteenth century it was used for public hangings and as a parade ground for the local militia.  In response to a growing need for fresh water in the city, Benjamin H. Latrobe designed a pump house to take water from the Schuylkill River into a more than twenty-thousand gallon capacity water tank, from whence it was distributed throughout the city by gravity.  This lovely classical building, built in 1800, was set in a bucolic setting, enhanced by William Rush’s statue of the “Nymph of the Schuylkill,” which was erected in 1809.  For years, the park around the pump house was a popular public attraction.  The pump house was in operation until 1815, when it was supplanted by the new Fairmount Waterworks, and the building was taken down in 1828. 

This lovely view of the Centre Square Waterworks, showing the eastern façade facing High, now Market Street , was drawn by John James Barralet, an Irish artist who came to Philadelphia about 1795.  Barralet had established a reputation as a landscape and historical artist in Dublin and London.  When he first arrived in Philadelphia he was hired as an engraver with Alexander Lawson, and he took up painting scenes in and around Philadelphia.  The engraving is by Cornelius Tiebout, who worked in New York, London and finally Philadelphia around 1799.  Tiebout was the best of the early, American-born engravers, and this lovely etching is one of his finest works.  This is the fourth state of the print, probably issued in the early 1830s.  H. Quig acquired Tiebout’s plate, and it appears that he added a small figure to the center of the print, perhaps in an attempt to enliven the scene.  This figure was crudely engraved, quite out of scale, and so Quig attempted to burnish the image off the plate.  This erasure was only partially successful, and so the third and fourth states of the print shows a light ghost image (see detailed photo) of this unfortunate interloper.  The fourth state is distinguished from the third by the appearance of Quig’s imprint at the bottom.