Quebec Map 1929 Pictorial Print - Quebec City, Montreal, Gaspe

Oliver Master wrote the text and Arthur Edward Elias supplied the drawings for this map of Quebec, part of the Dominion of Canada Animated Atlas published by Canada's Department of the Interior in 1929. The atlas replaced conventional boundary-and-railroad cartography with an illustrated promotional format, filling each provincial sheet with humorous drawings meant to advertise the region's economic strengths to settlers, investors and tourists across the Dominion and beyond. Quebec's sheet leans on the province's forestry, agriculture and hydroelectric development along the St. Lawrence, its illustrations mixing farm and mill scenes with the province's distinctly French-Canadian character. It captures Quebec sixty-two years after Confederation, at a moment when the province was still, through exactly this kind of government publication, working to present its industries to the rest of a Dominion that often saw it as culturally apart from English Canada.

Quebec City, the provincial capital, is marked at the St. Lawrence's narrowing point, its fortified walls and Chateau Frontenac already well established as national symbols by 1929. Montreal, downriver, appears as the province's commercial and industrial engine, its port the busiest on the St. Lawrence. Gaspe, far to the east on the peninsula that shares its name, is shown as a fishing community at the edge of settled Quebec, a reminder of how far the province's territory stretches beyond the St. Lawrence lowlands most maps of Quebec concentrate on. Together these three places sketch a province the Animated Atlas frames as running from an old fortified capital through an industrial metropolis to a remote fishing coast.

This whimsical sheet makes a fun gift for a Quebec family or a transplant with fond memories of the province, its whimsical, illustrated style suited to a casual room rather than a formal study. The store also carries Quebec mapped with far more administrative precision by Appleton in 1892 and by Cram in 1893, both built as working county references rather than promotional art; this 1929 edition is the only one in the collection designed purely to charm rather than to inform. It's offered unframed and available across a full range of sizes, from a compact print to a large-format wall piece.