.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘Published about 1776, [Fuseli’s print] is a copy of Hennepin’s view of Niagara, but wthout the gesticulating Europeans. Instead, it substitutes a single solitary Indian – an exact replica of the American Indian portrait best known in London then, the native American in the foreground of Benjamin West’s sensational The Death of General Wolfe painted in 1770 and widely disseminated in an engraving by William Woollett in 1776.’ (E. McKinsey, Niagara Falls, Icon of the American Sublime, Cambridge, 1985, p.22).
The le Clerc print is the second known engraving of Niagara Falls (c.1700), after the anonymous engraving (1697) in Hennepin’s A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America (London, 1698). ‘Directly adapted from the Hennepin print, the cataracts are even higher and the rocks more rugged. ... As in most of LeClerc’s compositions, and indeed in many seventeenth-century prints of natural phenomena, Niagara is more the occasion for religious allegory than a focus in and of itself.’ (E. McKinsey, op. cit., p.17)
The le Clerc print is the second known engraving of Niagara Falls (c.1700), after the anonymous engraving (1697) in Hennepin’s A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America (London, 1698). ‘Directly adapted from the Hennepin print, the cataracts are even higher and the rocks more rugged. ... As in most of LeClerc’s compositions, and indeed in many seventeenth-century prints of natural phenomena, Niagara is more the occasion for religious allegory than a focus in and of itself.’ (E. McKinsey, op. cit., p.17)