Description
A small round portrait of Fulton is inset beneath the picture surrounded by a short biography of his life:
The Farm in 1765 contained 364 acres, and was then owned by the Father of Robert Fulton. It is beautifully located about 22 miles South of the city of Lancaster. On the banks of the Conowingo creek, and at the cross roads leading to Lancaster, Philadelphia & Baltimore Cities. Robert Fulton was born in the year 1765. His Father emigrated from Ireland when young, and settled in Pennsylvania, where he married Miss Mary Smith. They had five children, three daughters, and two sons. Robert received his education in Lancaster city. In his boyhood, all his leisure hours were passed in Mechanic’s shops, or in painting. At 17 years of age he went to Philadelphia, where he was occupied in painting portraits and Landscapes. In 1793 he turned his attention to the subject of Steam Navigation. In 1807 amidst the jeers and ridicule of his fellow citizens, he launched his Steamboat “Clermont,” upon the Hudson River, at New York city, and there were not thirty persons in the city, who believed, that the boat would ever move one mile an hour, or ever be of the least utility. He died in 1815. Fulton’s invention has established the commerce of the world, and the wondrous Steamship, with the glorious “Stars and Strips” at their peak, have furrowed the ice and streaked with their smoke the perennial snows of the farthest polar latitudes accessible to man, and now shake with the thunder of their republican cannon, and their shriek of onset the most distant waters of Japan! The Nations of the earth now honor the man that raised himself above the buffeting storms, and created his own illustrious name.
Robert Fulton (1765-1815) was an American engineer and inventor who built the first commercially successful steamboat to operate in the U.S. He also designed submarines and warships and engineered canal systems. The George Glazer Gallery also has a contemporary painting of Fulton as a youth and a 19th-century model of a boat designed by Fulton.
John H. Sherwin was a lithographer and painter. From about 1852-62 he worked in Philadelphia for the Rosenthals, then in New York City and Boston. He exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1860.
Louis N. Rosenthal was a lithographer and miniaturist, who with his brothers was among the pioneers of chromolithography in America. Born in Berlin, he settled in Philadelphia around 1850 and established a business with his brothers Max, Morris and Simon as a lithographer, printer and publisher until around 1875.
References:
Groce, George C. and Wallace, David H. The New-York Historical Society’s Dictionary of Artists in America 1564-1860. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. (Rosenthal and Sherwin).
Peters, Harry T. America on Stone. U.S.: Doubleday, Doran, 1931. pp. 332 (Reigart & Dellinger), 343-346 (Rosenthal), 366 (Shewin).
