Des Barres, Joseph Frederick Wallet, publisher

A View of Boston, taken on the Road to Dorchester. 



Handcolored aquatint (20 1/2  x 27 3/8  in.; 546 x 695 mm), from the Atlantic Neptune, 30 May 1776 after W. Pierrie by James Newton.  A good impression with fine contemporary handcoloring; engraved captions restored.  Floated and glazed in a handsome frame. 

This rare atmospheric view of Boston was published by J. F. W. Des Barres, the most noted and skilled producer of coastal charts in late eighteenth-century England, in his monumental sea atlas, the Atlantic Neptune.  At the close of the French and Indian War, Des Barres was sent to America by the British Admiralty to survey the coasts of the Maritime Provinces. These provinces, so recently acquired from France, had never been adequately mapped, and Des Barres spent the next ten years constructing a series of charts of unparalleled accuracy and beauty.  Ultimately the Atlantic Neptune was expanded to include the entire Atlantic and Gulf coasts of North America.