View up Wall Street with City Hall [Federal Hall] and Trinity Church, New York City

Archibald Robertson’s view up Wall Street features New York’s second City Hall after its transformation into Federal Hall. Located at the corner of Wall and Nassau streets, the original building was constructed in 1699. When the U.S. Congress moved to New York in 1785, it joined the rest of the municipal government at City Hall. In 1789–90, the engineer and architect Pierre-Charles L’Enfant transformed City Hall into Federal Hall, the exclusive site of the new federal government until the capital moved. George Washington was inaugurated there, and the building served as the first home of the New-York Historical Society (1804–09), before being demolished in 1812. At the left in this watercolor Robertson included Trinity Church, completed in 1790 to replace the first Trinity Church that had been destroyed by fire in 1776.

Robertson’s technique is allied to early English watercolors, when works resembled drawings tinted with color after completion, rather than constructed with color from the beginning. His watercolor is close in style to those of the British draftsman Thomas Sandby, who exerted great influence on artists working in America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. More than likely Robertson knew Sandby’s work. A successful painter and founder of a drawing academy in Aberdeen, Robertson came to the U.S. in 1791 when a group of prominent New Yorkers invited him to establish an academy in their city. In 1792 Robertson and his brother Alexander founded the seminal Columbian Academy of Painting at 79 Liberty Street, one of the first art schools in the U.S.