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Charles Downing of Newburgh, New York, together with his younger brother Andrew Jackson Downing, was the author of the encyclopedic The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America. This important illustrated work, first appearing in 1845, went though numerous editions until even after the elder Downing's death in 1885. Although Andrew was given the primary credit by his reticent brother, Charles is generally acknowledged as having been the main architect of the book. After Andrew Jackson's untimely death in 1852 (in the fiery accidental sinking of the steamer Henry Clay on the Hudson River), Charles was the sole author responsible for its many revisions. The Downings owned the Downing Nursery in Newburgh. The 1847 and 1850 editions of the book are noteworthy for including some 70 beautifully chromolithographed plates (produced in Paris) of a wide variety of the fruits.
The photographer of the c. 1880 vignetted CDV was Abel Peck of Newburgh. The recipient had pasted some excerpts from Downing's letter to him on the verso.
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The same image (though reversed in the printing process) appears as the frontispiece to Ulysses Prentiss Hedrick's The Cherries of New York (1915)
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which includes this brief biographical sketch.
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A memoriam to Charles Downing by Marshall Pinckney Wilder, President of the American Pomological Society, and dedicatee of the Downing fruit book, appears in the 1885 Proceedings of the American Pomological Society.
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