A wonderful view of Boston, notable both for its grandly panoramic perspective and for its depiction of the city in minute detail: one receives the impression, for example, that Bachmann took care to capture every window, every pier on the many bridges, and even the correct rigging of each vessel plying the harbor. The view includes many recent and important additions to the urban landscape, in particular the Public Garden, the Providence and Worcester Railroad terminal at Park Square, the State House, and the Bunker Hill Monument. The marshy area in the foreground is the Back Bay, which was not completely filled until the 1880s.

Though Boston had of course been portrayed innumerable times prior to 1850, Bachmann’s is the first bird’s-eye view of the city. He was the first artist in America to employ the format on a grand scale, using “mathematics and hundreds of sketches on the ground” in order to depict locales from imaginary elevated points. The method allowed him to provide in one image both a sweeping panorama and immense detail of the urban landscape. Here Bachmann emphasizes Boston’s civility and livability by placing the Public Garden and Common front and center and overplaying their scale. This makes for an interesting contrast with his other major view of the city, Boston Bird’s Eye View from the North (1877), which emphasizes its roles as a commercial and transportation hub.

Reps writes of Bachmann that the views “he executed during the decade of the 1850s are particularly outstanding and are justifiably regarded… as among the finest American views to be found.” Yet almost nothing is known of his life other than what can be inferred from his prints. His Germanic name and the date of his earliest view (New York, 1849) indicate that he may have emigrated from Europe around the time of the revolutions of 1848. His work concentrated on major cities, including Hoboken, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia, but he is also well known for a series of six striking bird’s eye views of the Confederacy published during the Civil War.

There is a variant of this Boston view identifying Bachmann rather than Williams & Stevens as the publisher, though the nature of his relationship with that firm is unclear.

References
Boston and Beyond, p 58-59 (pl. 8); Reps, Views and Viewmakers, #1366. Reps provides a biography of Bachmann on pp. 160-161. See also Case, “John Bachmann and the American Birds Eye View Print.” Imprint vol. 33 no. 18, p. 19-35.