Trumbull, John (after) — Waterman Lilly Ormsby (engraver) | "The most important visual record of the heroic period of American history"

Trumbull, John (after) — Waterman Lilly Ormsby (engraver)

The Declaration of Independence. [New York: n.d., but circa 1876]

Original steel printing plate (plate size 610 x 829 mm). Engraved by Waterman Lilly Ormsby, pate maker's mark "J. Garside / Newark N.J." stamped on verso; some rust and oxidization, primarily to one corner. 

The original plate from which was printed one of the most admired engraved versions of "the most important visual record of the heroic period of American history" (CDAB).

The painting from which this image is taken was the result of eight years' work by John Trumbull: this is not surprising when one learns that, of the forty-eight portraits that it finally included, a remarkable thirty-six were executed from life. The painting, now in the Yale University Art Gallery, is undoubtedly Turnbull's masterpiece. "Without a flourish, without heroic gesture, with the associations of power and elegance transformed into sobriety and determination, Trumbull's painting is not grand, but it achieves grandeur. There is not another like it in the world. The very immobility of the figures and the airlessness of the room suggest the frozen instant in which had been born the new state, to be led not by the caprice or ambitions of a monarch, but by the sweet dictates of republican reason" (Jaffé).

"As a national image, The Declaration of Independence has penetrated the American consciousness through reproductions in history books, popular magazines, calendars, and every kind of image-making medium" (Jaffé). In the hierarchy of the reproductions of this image, the large format steel-engraved plate produced by Ormsby must rank very near the top: indeed a copy of it is to be found in the White House itself.

REFERENCE

Concise Dictionary of American Biography 751, 1082; Groce & Wallace 478, 637; Hamilton, Early American Book Illustrators and Wood Engravers 133, 467; Jaffé, John Trumbull 117; Stauffer 194