Best-seller, as expected, was a 1775, second issue copy of John Montressor’s famous Plan of the City of New-York & its Environs... The work of a leading English military surveyor, this was a map that had actually been made some 10 years earlier, but was the most detailed map of New York and the the island of Manhattan available when war broke out.
In ATG No 2419 I illustrated a copy that Leslie Hindman of Chicago had sold last November for $26,000 (then £20,155) but this DTA example, boldly pitched at $30,000-60,000, was picked up at just $21,000 (£16,935).
A second Montressor lot at the auction on April 25, a 1775 Map of the Province of New York with Part of Pensilvania and New England... sold at $8500 (£6855).
Manhattan taken
A map based on the work of another English surveyor and mapmaker, Samuel Holland, The Seat of Action between the British and American Forces... was published shortly after British forces took Manhattan in September 1776. It just edged past the low estimate to sell at $10,500 (£8470), but in 2014 Bonhams sold a copy for close on £12,000.
Among many views of New York offered, an 1866 panorama of Manhattan by John Bachmann, featuring in the foregound a baseball game being played at Hoboken on the west bank of the Hudson, made $7750 (£6250).
'Panorama of New York and Vicinity' by John Bachmann – $7750 (£6250).
The name of a close neighbouring district was recalled in a hand-coloured lithograph of an ironclad monitor, or gunship, the Weehawken, that doubled its estimate at $4750 (£3830).
Published by Endicott & Co. and dating from the 1860s, this was a print last seen in Parke Bernet’s New York rooms in 1967, when it was offered in company with a print of the American steam-powered sloop Iroquois.
New York, Taken from the Bay Near Bedlow’s Island, a hand-coloured aquatint of 1836 by William J Bennett after a painting by JG Chapman, was said to be a work not seen at auction for 100 years.
It made $7500 (£6050).
