United States Prints: Boston and the Hollywood Sign

The United States section holds two prints, both by Philip and Glyn Martin, and they sit at opposite ends of the country and of American self-image.

Beacon Hill, Boston is the first. Beacon Hill is the oldest part of Boston still standing more or less intact - brick row houses, gas lamps, cobbled lanes running down from the State House - and it is the most European-looking street scene in the USA. The Martins draw with a clean, precise line, and a neighbourhood built on brick courses and iron railings gives that line plenty to work with.

The Hollywood Sign is the other, and it is the opposite in every way: no architecture, no history to speak of, just nine white letters on a dry hillside above Los Angeles. It went up in 1923 as an advertisement for a housing development, lost the last four letters of HOLLYWOODLAND in the 1940s, and somehow became the most recognisable piece of signage on earth.

Boston brick and a Californian hillside is an odd pairing for a two-print section, but between them they cover both of the Americas that British buyers tend to have a connection with - the old east coast cities that feel half-familiar, and the west coast that everybody knows from films.

Prints of the United States sell here mainly to people with a personal link: a year spent working in Boston, a honeymoon in California, family who emigrated. That is the same logic that runs through the whole of the Places collection, which holds over four hundred prints across Britain, Ireland and beyond.

Both United States prints are printed on archival paper with fade-resistant inks, so nothing yellows over the years. Each has stayed in its wrapping since the day it was bought and has never been hung or displayed. Sizes suit a standard off-the-shelf frame and mount.

If there is another American city or landmark you are looking for, it is worth asking rather than assuming - the catalogue is larger than the website and we are happy to go and check.