Join us on Sunday, June 4 at 1 PM for William James Bennett’s Aquatint Views of New York Harbor and Staten Island, a lecture by Peter van Alfen, the Chief Curator at the Numismatic Society.

William James Bennett arrived in New York City in the mid-1820s from England, where he had mastered both watercolor painting and aquatint printmaking, an exacting and difficult type of printmaking that enjoyed a brief moment of popularity in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Over the next twenty years until his death in 1844, Bennett produced some of the most remarkable vistas of pre-Civil War America known today, including scenes of New York Harbor and Staten Island. This talk will discuss the aquatint process and Bennett’s place in the early American art scene before turning to a selection of Bennett’s prints illustrating the Harbor and Staten Island, with particular attention paid to the nautical oddities and maritime mysteries depicted in the prints.