R. W. G. Vail city. While staying with the Livingstons, he made a sketch of the city as seen from his host's home, from which he made a water- color copy and later executed a copperplate print which, with another made from Long Island, he hand-colored and offered for sale to the public. In describing the episode, Livingston said: "Charmed with the beauty of the landscape [as seen from Mount Pitt], M. de Saint Memin made a very exact drawing of it. [As] there existed no other [on the market], we suggested to him the idea of engraving and spreading it. I introduced him myself to the public library [The New York Society Library?], where he learned from the Encyclopedia the first principles of engraving. He soon made himself a master of this art. He was endowed by nature with a strong will and a trained mind; had an extraordinary aptitude for all the sciences, remarkable skill, and perseverance equal to any proof."1 This lovely view has survived in five forms: a pencil sketch, two watercolors, a plain engraving, and the same hand-colored. Livingston tells us that the artist made an exact drawing of the view. Of course this might mean a pencil sketch or a watercolor drawing but let us start with the former. An original unfinished pencil sketch (65.5 x 41 cm.), inscribed by the artist: New York prit de Mount-Pitt 1794, was bought from a bookseller on the Paris quays by John Anderson, Jr., in 1901 and sold by him to our Society in 1909.4 It is ruled into squares, lacks the road, fields, cattle, and other details of the foreground, and it is evident that certain features were added later with a softer pencil, including the coach, men in middle foreground, and the trees at left. There were certainly no trees in the original drawing for the erasure of the original sketch back of the tree trunks is plainly seen. It may be, then, that this was the first trial sketch which the artist drew and kept by him as an aid in drawing his later watercolors and engraving. Or it may have been drawn after the watercolors as an aid in transferring the view to the copper. It seems more likely, however, that this was the original sketch preceding all other forms of the picture but l5l