House Where First American Flag Was Made

Ernest C. Peixotto's ink sketch captures a narrow Philadelphia rowhouse, its steep gabled roof and shuttered windows rendered in quick, assured linework. The building's modest brick facade and ground-floor shop front recall late-eighteenth-century commercial architecture. Peixotto (1869–1940), a San Francisco-born illustrator, specialized in architectural studies and historical documentation. His economical pen technique—parallel hatching for shadow, spare notation for distant buildings—exemplifies the commercial illustration style that dominated American periodicals at century's end. Such sketches often accompanied historical articles in magazines and newspapers, establishing visual conventions later absorbed into the visual language of sequential art.