France & Corsica Map 1851 Pictorial Atlas Print - Paris, Toulouse, Lyon, Marseille, Ajaccio

John Tallis of London published this France in 1851 in R. Montgomery Martin's Illustrated Atlas, the year Tallis issued his Illustrated World Atlas for the Great Exhibition. Tallis, who lived from 1817 to 1876, was one of the last great decorative mapmakers, and his maps are prized for their vignettes of local scenes and people, engraved by John Rapkin and later reissued by the London Printing and Publishing Company with the Tallis imprint left intact. This sheet shows France with Corsica, set among vignettes of the Bridge of Toulouse, the Palace of Fontainebleau, the Garden of the Palais Royale, the Harbor at Calais and two sets of costumes. It dates from 1851, when Louis-Napoléon was president of the Second Republic and the empire was a year from being declared.

The vignettes turn the map into a tour of France, and the Bridge of Toulouse gives the southwest its place beside the north. Toulouse stands on the Garonne and was the old capital of Languedoc, and the bridge view speaks for the long road between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The Palace of Fontainebleau and the Garden of the Palais Royale stand for royal and Parisian France, while the Harbor at Calais shows the port that faces England across the Channel. The two sets of costumes show how people in different regions dressed, so that the sheet records a country of local customs as well as departments. Corsica sits beside the mainland, and together the views present France as a land of bridges, palaces, harbors and regions.

A traveler who has crossed the Garonne at Toulouse, a family from Corsica or the southwest, or a collector of Victorian pictorial atlases will find a lively gift here. TheMapVault lists the Tallis France of 1851 in more than one copy, and this one is chosen for the Toulouse bridge and the Corsica inset beside the mainland, whereas its plainer rivals such as Cram's 1883 map and the Stanford sheets of 1865 and 1872 carry no pictorial vignettes at all. The sheet is a showpiece in which the border views carry as much weight as the geography. Like every print in the collection, it ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes, from a compact desk piece to a large-format statement print.