Born into an aristocratic family, Nicolino Calyo fled his home in Naples, Italy, in the 1830s during the political and social uprisings of the unification movement. In the United States, he found a welcome audience for his sophisticated, academically trained style. His degree of skill and polish had rarely been known on this side of the Atlantic, and Calyo was quick to capitalize on it. New York lent itself perfectly to Calyo’s stock-in-trade: close observation of people and places, meticulously rendered in the precise topographical tradition of his fellow countrymen Canaletto and Francesco Guardi.

These two dramatic, contrasting views by Nicolino Calyo of the Great Fire in New York in 1835 and its aftermath depict one of the most cataclysmic events in the history of the city (B.2013.3). Seventeen blocks on the southeast tip of Manhattan were destroyed. Calyo’s series of paintings was popularized through aquatints by William James Bennett that brought the artist considerable acclaim.