Charleston Loan Exhibition

52 Pierre Charles Canot (French, 1710-1777), engraver, after a painting by Thomas Mellish (English, working, 1761–1778) A View of Charles Town the Capital of South Carolina in North America Published in Scenographia American a (1768) London, England, ca. 1768 Copperplate engraving, H. 14½ x W. 20¾ x D. ‡/* inches Historic Charleston Foundation, Charleston, SC, collection purchase, 95.5.1 Pierre Canot’s engraving of colonial Charleston’s fashionable thoroughfare on the Cooper River and its bustling harbor is a visual testament to the city’s prominence as a commercial seaport. Published in 1768, it was one of a folio of twenty-eight prints that celebrated Britain’s North American empire just five years after the official cessation of fighting in the Seven Years’ War, also known as the French and Indian War. A View of Charles Town is the only image devoted to a southern city, and it was available in only one published state, making it one of the rarer views in the folio. 1 A number of artists and engravers contributed to Scenographia Americana . Trained in Paris, Canot immigrated to England in the 1740s and was elected an associate engraver of the Royal Academy in 1770. His copperplate is based on a painting by the London-based artist Thomas Mellish, known for his marine subjects, and the original image has been attributed to a sketch drawn by James Crokatt, a prominent merchant and member of Charleston’s sizable Scottish community. 2 BSC, KS 1. Gloria Gilda Deák, Picturing America: Prints, Maps, and Drawings Bearing on the New World Discoveries and on the Development of the Territory that is now the United States, 1497-1899, Vol. I, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 71. Gloria Gilda Deák, Other Voices, Other Times: American Historical Prints of the 18 th and 19 th Centuries (New York: Kennedy Galleries, 1985), 13. 2. This original painting is in the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, East Yorkshire, United Kingdom. Sayer and Bowles Enlarged Catalogue of New and Valuable Prints in Sets, or Single… (London: reprinted by Redwood Press Limited, 1775), 47.