William Russell Birch (1755-1834)
The Country Seats of the United States of North America, with some Scenes connected with them
Springland near Bristol, Pennsylvania: Designed and Published by W. Birch,
Enamel Painter, 1808[-09]
20 color plates

William Birch exhibited miniature and watercolor paintings in London for twenty years before he immigrated to Philadelphia in 1794. In 1791 he engraved Delices de la Grande Bretagne, a copper-plate book of the type that he would introduce to America with The City of Philadelphia (1800), a volume that celebrated what Birch called the "eminence" of the new American capital.

Country Seats of the United States is an early pictorial record of rural buildings and of a storied river, the Schuylkill. Thirteen of its twenty plates are given to architecture or scenery near Philadelphia. Birch stated that the purpose of the publication was to promote "Taste" in architecture and landscape design, and thereby favorably shape the character of the new nation and establish its "respectability." In actuality, the artist was driven as much by a personal motive. Having immigrated for the opportunity to join the gentry, he had purchased near Philadelphia his own estate, Springland, the grounds of which he pictured in two plates in Country Seats as evidence of his own taste and social status. The house at Springland drained Birch financially and was never completed. At least partly for that reason the artist stressed "the beauty of the situation" of any country seat over "the massy magnitude of the edifice."

Pictured here is "Mount Vernon, Virginia, the Seat of the late Genl. G. Washington" (copper plate engraving with hand coloring, 4 x 5 3/8 in.). Typically, Birch's view shows off the landscape, with the Potomac River prominent in the distance. "This hallowed mansion is founded upon a rocky eminence, a dignified height on the Potomac," Birch writes in introducing the view. As seen here, the artist worked his copper plates with line and stipple engraving, then hand colored the prints to create appealing detail and color.

Image rights owned by the Virginia Historical Society.
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