19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2004 by DeCourcy E. McIntosh

It may have been only coincidental that the setting of Broadway--the block between Spring and Prince Streets--portrayed the same location captured in a glass negative made about two years earlier by Silas A. Holmes or Charles DeForest Fredricks (Pl. XIV). (44) The main compositional difference between the two images is their viewpoint: the photograph looks from south to north, the print from north to south. And while the photograph depicts real vehicular and pedestrian traffic, the print presents a fictional tableau of urban mayhem. We do not know whether Knoedler or Sebron ever saw the photograph, which was never published; but Holmes and Fredricks were not the only photographers documenting the streets of New York in the 1850s. Knoedler must have known one of the others, Victor Prevost (1820-1881), who had produced a lithograph for Goupil, The Young American Sailor, shortly after he arrived in the United States from France in 1848. (45) As a young man, Prevost had been a student of Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), the most reproduced artist of his age and the cynosure of Goupil catalogues. Delaroche was also the teacher of Gustave Le Gray (1820-1882), and Prevost learned the waxed-paper-negative process from Le Gray and used it for his photographs of New York. (46) But Knoedler seems to have ignored Prevost's picture-taking up and down Broadway, at least commercially, even though the work took place before his very eyes. Instead, he limited his involvement with photography to art reproductions--with one notable exception.

The last urban view Knoedler published was The Mouth of the Hudson, after the American Claude, George Loring Brown (1814-1889). (47) It entered the market in 1861, the same year that, three thousand miles from the mouth of the Hudson, Carleton E. Watkins (1829-1916) was making his striking photographs of the remote Yosemite Valley. In December 1862, the Goupil Gallery (as it was still called) showed Watkins's Yosemite photographs. The exhibition must have sprung from motives other than profit, for it had no sequel, inspired no publication, and inaugurated no deeper engagement on Knoedler's part with Watkins's medium. Critical acclaim for Watkins's work was one thing, finding a market for photography of the American West--a market comparable to the one Knoedler had cultivated for reproductive prints--may have been quite another. As the photograph began rendering lithographed and engraved views obsolete, it would be up to others to exploit the change.

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(1) Entry for August 5, 1840, in Asher B. Durand's journal (Asher B. Durand Papers, New York Public Library, New York City, on microfilm reel 20, frames 037-039, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.). "Mr. Boilly" was the engraver Alphonse Boilly (1801-1867), son of the genre painter Louis Leopold Boilly (1761-1845).

(2) Listed in Longworth's New-York Directory as "Bailly & Ward, fancy goods, 96 William Street," the firm consisted of Simon Bailly and Augustus H. Ward. Longworth's for 1818-1819 lists "Bailly, S. 96 William." He was presumably French or of French extraction, while Ward, who joined him in 1828, was a born-and-bred New Yorker. By the early 1830s, the firm had become a major copublisher and importer of French popular lithographs and French engravings, including aquatint views of American Atlantic seaports. Bailly and Ward often appears as copublisher with Rittner and Goupil and with the London publisher Charles Tilt (see Pl. I). The final New York City directory listing for Bailly, Ward and Company is dated 1842: by 1843 Ward appears alone as a merchant at 41 Maiden Lane.