William Henry Bartlett: Erie Canal, Lockport Illustration

The Images, Cartoons, and Other Visual Sources That Shaped America
Table of Contents
William Henry Bartlett: Erie Canal, Lockport Illustration
Overview
About the Artist
Document Image
Context
Explanation and Analysis of the Document

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Abstract

The appropriately named Lockport is a city in New York State located about twenty miles east of Niagara Falls. During his 1838 trip to Canada, the artist Willian Henry Bartlett would have passed through Lockport on his way to visit an author, Nathaniel Parker Willis, whose book he was illustrating. In Lockport, he would have made a sketch of an Erie Canal lock. The sketch was later converted into a steel engraving for publication in Willis’s American Scenery; or Land, Lake, and River: Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature. This iconic and widely reproduced image provides a snapshot of the transportation revolution the young United States was undergoing as it was pushing its boundaries westward during the early decades of the nineteenth century.

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