Roger's Slide, Lake George, New York

Thomas Creswick, R.A. was an English landscape painter and illustrator, and one of the best-known members of the Birmingham School of landscape painters. Though this work and lot 42 depict Lake George in upstate New York, Creswick never visited the United States. Instead, he based these paintings on either a drawing or print by the English topographical artist William Henry Bartlett, who first traveled to America in 1836 in the company of the American writer Nathaniel Parker Willis. Beginning in 1837, British publisher George Virtue began to publish Bartlett’s illustrations with text by Willis, entitled American Scenery: or Land, Lake, and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature. The book and its prints were first issued in a series of parts running to November 1839, and then the entire work was issued in two volumes in January 1840. Both the book and Bartlett’s prints were a huge success. American Scenery was reissued numerous times up to about 1870 and the prints (and pirated copies of them) appeared not only in these volumes, but also in magazines, other books, and as separate prints, illustrating their popularity.