Greece—William Stillman | View of the Acropolis from the Musaeum Hill, [1870], carbon print

Greece—William Stillman

View of the Acropolis from the Musaeum Hill, [1870]

carbon print (187 x 235mm.), mounted, framed and glazed, minor browning

A rare photograph of Athens, which was the first image published in Stillman’s The Acropolis of Athens (London: S. F. Ellis, 1870) which drew from a series of photographs taken by Stillman in Athens in 1869. Scholar Andrew Szegedy-Maszak notes that this photograph “exemplifies [Stillman’s] pictorial practice.”

The Athenian Acropolis, one of the most famous landmarks of ancient Greece, has been an important site since the 3rd millennium BCE. Its most prominent building, the Parthenon was constructed between 447 and 438 BCE as a temple to Athena.

An eccentric personality who excelled in many fields, including painting, art criticism, photography and journalism, Stillman co-founded the first serious American art journal, The Crayon. The Atlantic noted of Stillman’s work, “the points of view are chosen with the fine feeling of an artist.”