In Religious Geography of New York today we started our historical overview. Our text is Eric Homberger's wonderful Historical Atlas of New York, but I started our discussion by handing out copies of two interesting early pictures of the city not in that book. Look at them yourself - click the pics for detail: what's so interesting about them?
Let's start with the top one, which dates from 1672. What's wrong with it? Everything - including the name (the city had by that time been renamed New York, though it was a year from being briefly restored to New Amsterdamhood until the Brits traded Surinam to get it back). There are place names one might expect - a Chateau de Nassau along with other city fixtures like a Grand Rue, a Hopital, a Place de la Bourse and a commanding Maison de Ville - but the Québec perched atop the hill on the right should tell you something's very wrong. But what?Look at the second picture. It's from 1700 and shows New York (still remembered by the old name as well) as it probably looked. What rings false here are the noble savages, and the palm trees. Palm trees? Hadn't the artist seen New York? Of course not. Like printmakers before him, he was working from descriptions, including sketches, from people who had - but it was his task and his specialty to fill them out credibly. Presumably none of his sources had bothered to note what kinds of trees covered the island of Manahato, or how the natives looked, so he inserted stock savages and palm trees he surmised might belong from similar places (or rather: images of other places). (You might still wonder why Mme Savage is holding so tight to that tree; perhaps she senses that her people will be plucked from the picture along with it.)
The arist behind the top picture was doing the same - but starting with even less. He didn't just fill in people and flora from other pictures - he imported, wholesale, a city: Lisbon. The printmaker Jollain's Parisian customers, eager to know what the new city looked like, wouldn't know any better!
My point was not that you have to take historical representations with a grain of salt. It was, rather, that artists - like historians, anthropologists, journalists - fill in the gaps of their sources to make their representations seem complete and credible. In some cases, like the top picture, they knew they were fabulating; in others, they were venturing their best guesses. A pretty standard point about reading historical materials (nay, any materials by human beings), but rather a neat way of making it, no?
Source of both pictures: Impressions of New York: Prints from the New-York Historical Society, ed. Marilyn Symmes (NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)
