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By Root 7844 0

painters, sculptors, and the engravers and die casters who prepared prints for reproduction. The AAU’s gallery, one paper reported, had “grown to be a kind of municipal Institution, visited by the whole people.” The managers had established a luxurious setting on bustling Broadway, replete with ottomans and gas lights, that stayed open at night when working people could come. The gallery drew from “every section of the social system,” the press noted, “from the millionaire of 5th Avenue, to the B’hoy of 3d.” Half a million people visited in 1848, the organization claimed, a number roughly equal to the city’s entire population.

The AAU collected enemies too: envious and profit-seeking private art galleries; disgruntled rejected artists; connoisseurs who sniffed at the sometimes mediocre work submitted by sign painters, itinerant portraitists, lithographers, and banner painters; and the National Academy of Design, which, though many of its members participated in AAU affairs, worried about dwindling attendance at its own exhibitions. What finally brought the AAU down, however, was an assault by powerful antigambling forces (backed by Bennett’s Herald) who managed in 1852 to have its lottery ruled illegal.

The private art market now flourished. The National Academy’s annual spring exhibit blossomed into a major event. Galleries catered to wealthy collectors like department store owner A. T. Stewart, and Broadway showrooms attracted a steady patronage—occasionally a spectacular one: when Edwin Church’s Niagara was first exhibited in May of 1857 thousands crowded into the gallery each day. The Art-Union had left its mark, however, in a heightened public interest in art, in the precedent it had set for a municipal museum, and in boosting the growing popularity of reproductions and strengthening the city’s role in their supply.

Engraver and printer Nathaniel Currier, who had long been producing and marketing images from his Nassau Street shop in the heart of the newspaper district, was joined after 1852 by James Merritt Ives, a self-trained artist, who became his partner in 1857. Currier and Ives used the latest in steam-driven press technology to churn out lithographs from sketches drawn by staff artists. They also hired hundreds of women to hand-color the prints. Their inexpensive “Colored Engravings for the People” provided uplifting images of family life for moderate-income households.

They also portrayed New York City. Currier and Ives views of Broadway, the burning of the Crystal Palace, P. T Barnum’s galleries, and the clipper ships all sold briskly. The firm’s success spurred competitors into providing urban imagery. Specialized producers turned out lithographed advertisements for ironworks, inexpensive wall prints of tourist spots, engravings of local scenes for guidebooks, and—for banks, shops, hotels, real estate promoters, and tourist operators—the bird’s-eye views that presented a coherent and comprehensible metropolis, laid out for delectation and consumption.

The great national monthlies like Harper’s and Putnam’s joined in the preening. In 1853 Putnam’s offered an illustrated series called “New-York Daguerreotyped” that depicted the emblematic edifices—the Crystal Palace, the department stores, the newspaper headquarters, the monster hotels—deemed “worthy of her pretensions as the metropolis of the Union.” In 1854 another running commentary appeared in Putnam’s—“The World of New York”—which hailed the city’s energy, wealth, and culture. City sights and scenes also saturated the popular press, with Harper’s, Putnam’s, and journals like Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (1855) and the New York Illustrated News (1859) helping make New York the most represented city in the country.

The process of urban imaging was further accelerated by the debut of photography. When news of Louis Daguerre’s success in fixing images on silver-coated copper plates arrived in New York City in 1839, the omni-capable Samuel F. B. Morse, together with scientific instrument maker George W. Prosch, devised a rudimentary camera. From