France Map 1851 Costume Vignette Print - Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Strasbourg, Rouen

John Tallis of London published this France in 1851 as a decorative map from one of the great nineteenth-century illustrated atlases, and the catalog describes this example as a striking full-color copy. Tallis, who lived from 1817 to 1876, published the Illustrated World Atlas for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the maps were engraved by John Rapkin, with the Tallis imprint left intact when the London Printing and Publishing Company later reissued them. The sheet includes Corsica and is set among vignettes of the Bridge of Toulouse, the Palace of Fontainebleau, the Garden of the Palais Royale and the Harbor at Calais, together with two sets of costumes. It dates from 1851, when France was a republic that was about to become an empire.

The two sets of costumes are the human subject of the sheet, showing regional dress at a time when a Breton, an Alsatian and a Provençal could still be told apart by what they wore. Around them the vignettes record the monuments of a tourist's France: the Bridge of Toulouse, the Palace of Fontainebleau, the Garden of the Palais Royale and the Harbor at Calais. Corsica is on the sheet beside the mainland, so the whole of French territory is gathered in one view. The costume figures make the map social as well as geographical, since they show the people of the provinces that the departments had replaced. This is why costume maps like Tallis's were popular with Victorian readers who wanted to see how other nations lived.

A family proud of its Breton, Alsatian or Provençal roots, a student of regional costume, or a collector of Victorian pictorial atlases will find a charming gift here. TheMapVault lists the Tallis France of 1851 in more than one copy, and this one is chosen for the costume figures that give the sheet its human side, whereas Cram's 1883 map and the Stanford sheets of 1865 and 1872 are plain geography with no figures at all. Tallis made this full-color example as a showpiece. 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.