Balloon view, Nantucket to Boston

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Rather than a street-level scene, this print shows a bird's-eye panorama, as if the viewer were drifting in a balloon between Nantucket and Boston. Aerial views like this were a popular form in the nineteenth century, when printmakers combined surveyed geography with an imagined vantage point to show coastlines, harbors and towns at a glance. As a color print, it belongs to a wave of colored lithographs that circulated widely as decorative views of American cities and their surroundings. It is worth noticing how the artist links distant places into one continuous landscape.

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