Rural Cemeteries of America. Green-Wood Illustrated in a Series of Views Taken Expressly for This Work [together with] Mount Auburn Illustrated in a Series of Views from Drawings by James Smillie. (Two volumes in one) by Smillie, James, engraver. Texts by N. Cleaveland and Cornelia W. Walter, respectively - 1847 and 1850

New York: R. Martin, 1847 and 1850. First and later edition respectively. Half Morocco. Very Good. 4to. viii, 94, [1], 119, [1] pp. 38 steel engraved plates in all, including frontis maps of cemeteries in their respective volumes. Plus two penciled notes written by the famous engraver, Smillie, presumably. These are written on the backs of two plates, one the frontis map plate of the second part. Cemeteries have long been green oases in densely populated urban areas, and in the nineteenth century a tradition of opulence developed in which the wealthy spared no expense in building mosoleums and memorials to themselves. Thus at least in the more celebrated cemeteries can be found a bucolic beauty enveloping much architectural splendor, and this series captured these attributes for an appreciative audience. Greenwood is a vast expanse in Brooklyn, and Mount Auburn is its equivalent in the Boston area. Smillie (1807 - 1885) was an engraver born in Edinburgh who immigrated to the U.S. as an adult after spending time in Quebec. He is best known today as an engraver who worked with such Hudson River School artists as Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt. His bread and butter work, though, was engraving bank notes. Spine morocco with a few chips now mostly concealed with goup or paint. Front marbled endpapers torn by the hinge. Occasional very light soiling but generally clean. Binding is tight.