Preface
The essays in this issue of Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes represent those delivered as part of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia's first Roger W. Moss Symposium, honoring the Athenaeum's longtime Executor Director. Entitled ‘The landscapes of William Birch: providing a context’, the symposium was generously supported by the Barra Foundation and marked as well the long and warm relationship between Roger W. Moss and Robert L. McNeil, Jr. (1915–2010), who, when he learned of Roger's plans to retire after 40 years with the Athenaeum, determined to establish a fund to support an appropriate scholarly symposium, which would be endowed in perpetuity. The Birch symposium marks the first use of that fund.
Accompanied by an exhibition which showcased the remarkable holdings of the Marian Carson Collection of Birch drawings, watercolors, and books, mixed with the Athenaeum's own holdings and items borrowed from other museums and libraries, the symposium featured the efforts of academics to come to grips with Birch's place in both the English picturesque movement and the American art and cultural community. Long revered as the first artist successfully to publish engraved views in the United States, Birch arrived in Philadelphia in 1794 with contacts already established due to his career in England.
As John Dixon Hunt reveals, Birch had absorbed the strategies of the picturesque and had successfully published his complex account of British landscapes in his 1791 Délices de la Grande Bretagne, a series of 36 engraved plates of picturesque scenes, accompanied by his annotations and descriptions, in which he exposed his familiarity with the work of such major artists as Benjamin West, Joshua Reynolds, and Thomas Gainsborough. Hunt's essay makes clear the background that Birch had already interpreted through his successful Délices.
Building upon Hunt's essay, but taking it in a different direction, Wendy Bellion addresses the theatre scene in Philadelphia at the time, looking away from paintings towards the plays and performances and their use of painted backdrops that responded to the sublime and the picturesque. Drawing upon her knowledge of spectacle with the American culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, she brings new research to bear on the question of Birch's place in Philadelphia, especially in his relations with the city's theatrical world.
What Bellion, and later Michael J. Lewis, do is to situate theatre scenery and urban scenes within a larger context: drawing upon Birch's picturesque experiences in Great Britain, notably his interest in human action and its associations, including the imagery of movement, and the relationship between theatre settings and their use in both the ‘scenes’ of landscape gardens and the larger topography; both Bellion and Lewis reveal the implications of this rich arsenal for north America. Lewis notes that William Hamilton, visiting England in 1786, responded clearly to the theatre of its gardens, emphasized his spectatorship in them and enjoyment of ‘prospects’.
Taking yet another point of view with his ‘William Birch and the culture of architecture in Philadelphia’, Michael J. Lewis brings considerable depth to his consideration of the architecture of early nineteenth-century Philadelphia, especially as it influenced both Birch's 1800 The City of Philadelphia, a series of 28 views, and his 1808 The Country Seats of the United States of North America, which found less success with his usual patrons. In both publications Birch celebrated his adopted city and country and attempted to find in it versions of the picturesque that he had explored in Great Britain. Lewis's contribution allows the reader to see the actual bricks and mortar of those buildings, along with their landscape surroundings, while conveying to us the social context for the architecture of the new century, especially in Philadelphia. The architectural milieu of this city was thus the theatre of the new nation: its forms, buildings and institutions provided apt scenes, picturesque landscapes, wherein to conduct its life and culture and to serve to perform its new role among nations.
Capping this set of essays is the contribution of Emily T. Cooperman, whose research has been devoted to William Russell Birch for many years, beginning with her University of Pennsylvania dissertation, which provided part of the background for her introduction to a reprint of Birch's Country Seats (2008). She then published, with co-author Lea Carson Sherk, daughter of collector Marian Carson, William Birch: Picturing the American Scene (2010), to coincide with the Roger W. Moss Symposium. Her new essay here, ‘Another fifty years may lay a foundation: the legacy of Birch's landscape art’, examines Birch's own writings and his place in the realm of American landscape painting and place-making in the early nineteenth-century and provides further contexts for his success in Philadelphia.
This long-awaited examination of William Russell Birch aims to provide more than context for an artist less well known outside Philadelphia. The ambitious Roger W. Moss symposiasts look into the British background as well as the American community to which Birch so mightily contributed, as they delve into his own writings for insight into his place in the American scene.
All images by William Birch are from either his Délices de la Grande Bretange, The City of Philadelphia (1800, later versions will be identified), or The Country Seats of North America.