19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2004 by DeCourcy E. McIntosh

Almost twenty years would elapse before Knoedler essayed his final view of Niagara. By mid-1857, he was doing business as "Goupil & Co., M. Knoedler & Co., Successor," with the day-to-day management of his print department in the hands of his younger brother, John (1828-1891). (33) However, it was Michael who organized publication of the line engraving by William Forrest after Frederic Edwin Church's panoramic Niagara: The Great Fall of 1857 (Pl.X). This was the second reproduction of the painting, the first having been a three-foot-wide chromolithograph that Knoedler's chief rival, Williams, Stevens, Williams and Company of New York City, published after the painting in 1858. (34) In the 1860s, Knoedler had published chromolithographs after two other paintings by Church, Our Banner in the Sky (1861; Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, New York) and Niagara Falls, from the American Side (1867; National Gallery, Edinburgh). Surviving company records concerning Niagara Falls, from the American Side reveal that between October 1868 and March 1869, Knoedler sold a mere sixteen copies of the chromolithograph--but they were expensive. The chromo itself cost sixty dollars, and when surrounded with a plush or engraved frame, it fetched one hundred dollars or more, a figure comparable to that of a framed copy of a "Raphael" Madonna painted on porcelain. (35) Clearly, a Church Niagara, like a "Raphael" on porcelain, was an objet de luxe. (36)

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Knoedler did not initiate the Forrest line engraving but took it over from John McClure, a former employee of Williams, Stevens, Williams and Company who published The Heart of the Andes as a line engraving in 1861. Although McClure set Forrest to work on the engraving around 1863, the unfinished plate languished, as sometimes happened in the tedious practice of line engraving. In 1869 Knoedler acquired from McClure the plates for three Church compositions--Icebergs and Under Niagara, as well as The Heart of the Andes--and ultimately the unfinished engraving of Niagara. Although he never published Icebergs or Under Niagara, Knoedler issued Niagara. The Great Fall in an edition of 925 just before Christmas 1875 (Pl. X), with the price scaled downward from $26.50 to $7.50. (37) But by 1884, with Church past the peak of his popularity, the price had fallen to $6 for a black-and-white impression on plain paper: And by 1898, two years before the artist's death, the plain engraving cost only $3.

If Niagara was the subject that engaged the Maison Goupil most frequently with the drama of the American landscape, New York City was grist for its involvement with the burgeoning urban scene. Eager to exploit the market for bird's-eye views--those large, minutely detailed aerial perspectives inviting the curious to pick out their favorite land-marks--Schaus commissioned from a trio of specialists in the genre a vista of greater New York, which, rendered in aquatint by Himely, sold for three dollars plain and six dollars colored, when it was published in 1851 (Pl. XI). (38) Considering New York's rapid rate of growth and the popularity of bird's-eye views, it is not surprising that Knoedler, once he was in charge, turned to John Bornet for another such view in 1854 (39) and for a variation, Panorama of New York Harbor, in 1856. (40)