Joshua Shaw (English/American, 1776-1861, worked in England to 1817), "An American Romantic Landscape with Bridges and Waterfall", c. 1820s oil on canvas, signed "SHAW" lower left, 14 1/8 in. x 20 in., in a period giltwood frame. E12000-18000 Provenance: Freeman's, Philadelphia; Alexander Gallery, New York (label en verso) Note: A professional English artist trained in Bath and London (and a long- standing exhibitor at the Royal Academy), Shaw immigrated to America in 1817 through his friendship with Benjamin West, the American-born president of the R. A., whose "Christ Healing the Sick" Shaw accompanied to its commissioned destination in Philadelphia, which became his home for a full quarter of a century. In 1818-1819 he undertook extensive travels through the South and East, drawing views to be engraved by his fellow-Englishman John Hill (1770-1850), for Shaw's serial publication of Picturesque Views of American Scenery, issued at Philadelphia in 1819-1821. This was the first professional celebration of the American landscape through fine printmaking, and it had a revolutionary effect (as did Shaw's continuing career as a painter) on the development of American art. Its engravings introduced artists and collectors to Shaw's persuasive interpretation of landscape in the style of "Romantic Classicism," as practiced (through their admiration of the 17th-c. models of Claude Lorrain) by such English masters as Thomas Gainsborough, Philip de Loutherbourg, and- above all-Richard Wilson. This spectacular sunrise or sunset view in lot 363, is a most characteristic early work of Shaw in America. It combines the framing, feathery trees and luminous recessions of those Romantic progenitors into an idyllic masterpiece that may well reflect his early North American preoccupation with specific topographic subjects. Although strongly idealized, as an image closely reflecting Edmund Burke's seminal essay on the "Sublime and [the Beautiful" ( London, 1757), this distant view of a ten-lighted structure in a gentle curve above a sheet of water quite exactly recalls the gently curving, ten-windowed span of Robert Mills's Upper Ferry Bridge (1809- 1812, burned 1838) over the Schuylkill River, near Philadelphia's Fairmont Park-whose bosky glades are similarly evoked on these banks ( albeit with the inclusion of an improbably high waterfall, recalling such a favorite of English Romantic landscape painters as the cascades at Tivoli, above the Roman Campagna). Shaw's typically understated signature, on this jewel-like canvas, is subtly painted in dark green capitals on a green ground, exactly as the comparable signature, on his "Pioneers" of c. 1838 in the Indianapolis Museum of Art, is inscribed with equal understatement in peach on rose, those being the identical tones employed in the distant forms and foreground reflections of this hauntingly beautiful masterwork.