American Historical Ephemera & Photography, Featuring Property from the James Milgram, M.D., Collection of Broadsides, Ephemeral Americana & Historical Documents

Etching with hand-coloring, [1778?], image 15 x 9 in. (19 3/16 x 12 5/8 in. sheet), on laid paper, light soil, framed to 23 3/8 x 17 in., not examined out of frame. 

A representation of the (first) Great Fire of New York which ignited on the night of 19 September 1776 and burned until the 21st, during the earliest days of the British occupation of New York. Destroying hundreds of buildings, many of the populace thought it was deliberately set by either the occupiers or the American revolutionaries. 

 A vue d'optique was designed to provide the illusion of depth when viewed with a zograscope. The inferno is dynamically rendered and chaos reigns in the streets with a figure being beaten in the foreground and several looters, including Black subjects. The caption lists several institutions that were lost to the blaze. 

Possibly a later edition or pirated copy after the vue d'optique by Francois Xavier Habermann, a copy of which is held in the New York Public Library and features a differing caption in both German and French. The copy held by Mt. Vernon is identical to this copy with an imprint by J. Chereau of rue St. Jacques. Another version held by the Library of Congress bears a Chez Basset imprint with an identical French caption to this copy.