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Thumbnail-size images of copyrighted artworks are displayed under fair use, in accordance with guidelines recommended by the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, published by the College Art Association in February 2015.
Plan of the city of Washington in the territory of Columbia: ceded by the states of Virginia and Maryland to the United States of America, and by them established as the seat of their government, after the year MDCCC.
American
1792
Medium/Technique
Engraving
Dimensions
Sheet: 53.3 × 69.9 cm (21 × 27 1/2 in.)
Credit Line
Gift of Kent Lydecker
Accession Number2022.2007
NOT ON VIEW
ClassificationsPrints
This plan of the newly designed city of Washington D.C. is one of the most important early American maps. Created in 1792 as a sort of first public announcement of the United States's new capital city, it was commissioned specifically by the federal government as a way of conveying the ambition of the plan, and by extension the ambition of the new federal government. In fact, the government commissioned two engraved versions of the plan, drawn up by the French architect Pierre L'Enfant, from different engravers, one in Philadelphia and one in Boston. The Boston engraving was finished first and quickly began to be distributed abroad; but this, more elegant, version has become the iconic image of the new city. Washington D.C. was far from the first planned city in the Americas, but it was unmatched for its comprehensive plan and grandeur---a plan so ambitious that only in recent decades has the city truly filled in the frame imagined by L'Enfant.
ProvenanceBy 1961, John K. and Helen B. Lydecker (b. 1925 - d. 2014), Washington D.C. and Midland, TX; by descent to Helen Lydecker; 1995, gift of Helen Lydecker to Kent Lydecker, Cambridge, MA; 2022, gift of Kent Lydecker to the MFA. (Accession Date: December 6, 2022)