This rare lithograph depicts the Old Senate Chamber around 1848 – approximately a decade prior to the Senate's move to its current location. The image is from a series of fifty-four Views of American Cities produced by Augustus Köllner and published between 1848 and 1851. Köllner, a German-born lithographer and painter, was considered one of the elite artists working in Philadelphia during the city's boom in commercial lithography in the mid-1800s. He traveled widely throughout the United States in the 1840s, producing water-color images of American scenes that were later transferred into lithographs, like the one shown here. Dating to the end of the 18th century, lithography originated as a "poor-man's" print process of transferring grease drawings to limestone and then pressing paper to the water and inked-soaked stone to produce an image. Köllner's lithograph series also includes a similar view of the original House of Representatives Chamber (now Statuary Hall) and an east view of the Capitol as it appeared in 1848.