Réprésentation du feu terrible à nouvelle Yorck, que les Américains allumé pendant la nuit du 19. septembre 1776 (Representation of the terrible fire at New York, that the Americans lit during the night of September 19, 1776)

Five days after British troops commanded by General William Howe landed in Manhattan, a great fire destroyed much of the city’s southwest end. At the time, many assumed that American Revolutionary sympathizers had started the blaze, but its precise cause remains unknown. In this image designed in Augsburg and reissued in Paris, flames engulf large, elegant buildings along a street that may be Broadway, as skirmishes take place and figures flee. Known as vues d’optique, this print and the adjacent one were intended to be viewed through a device called a perspective glass or zograscope, which reverses the image and enhances its three dimensionality.