Faneuil Hall, From the Water

Artwork

1838

Binghamton University Art Museum, Binghamton, New York.

Color image of an engraving titled "Faneuil Hall, From the Water." The image features a drawing in the center with muted blue, grey, and red colors, surrounded by an off-white border. The viewpoint of the etching is from the water, as if the viewer is on a ship. The foreground is mostly water, with a seagull and a buoy in the front, and with a large ship, all its rigging, and a small dinghy coming into the image from the left. There is a smaller sailboat closer to land in the center of the image and two small sailboats on the right. All of these boats are manned by people. The land is almost at midground of the image. It drops off into the water, shored up by a wall of wood or stone. There are crowds of tiny people and at least one vehicle on the land in what is now Faneuil Hall Marketplace. Faneuil Hall, glowing white in the background, sits just to the right of center. What is now Quincy Market, white, topped with a large red dome, sits off a bit further right. More large white buildings are on the left. The marketplace looks like a bustling metropolis with impressive, large, clean buildings. To the very far right, close to the water is a more dilapitated wooden building with four stories and a smoke stack. Seagulls are gathering on its red roof. The sky is dark and perhaps a bit stormy, but the water is calm.

Thomas Prior engraved this image of Faneuil Hall in 1838, only four years after the establishment of the General Trades' Union in Boston.

This image is of a hand-tinted engraving of the Faneuil Hall Marketplace created around 1838. A British artist named William Henry Bartlett drew the original picture, and Thomas Abiel Prior, a British engraver, transferred the image into a steel plate. They could use the plate to make reproductions of Bartlett’s drawing.

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