France & Switzerland Map 1856 Atlas Print - Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Geneva, Zurich

Charles W. Morse drew and engraved this map of France and Switzerland for Morse's General Atlas of the World, which D. Appleton and Company of New York published in 1856 with descriptions and statistics by Charles Colby. The atlas is Morse's only folio, and it draws on the cerographic maps that Sidney E. Morse and Breese had pioneered, a wax-engraving process cheaper than copper, but here each sheet was colored by hand, giving the printing more finish than most American atlas maps of the decade. The catalog describes him as the son of Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph. The map measures 32 by 36 centimeters at 1:4,300,000, shows relief by hachures, uses both Washington and Greenwich as prime meridians, and outlines the borders of both countries in red, in a year when the Treaty of Paris ended the Crimean War and Napoleon III's Second Empire stood at the height of its European prestige.

France is divided into its départements, each tinted in its own color, and the sheet labels the North Sea and the Mediterranean on its edges. Paris, the capital of the Second Empire, stands on the Seine, while Lyon, at the junction of the Rhône and the Saône, was the center of the French silk trade. Geneva, on the lake that bears its name, lies on the Swiss border and was already the home of watchmakers and bankers. Switzerland itself had become a federal state under the constitution of 1848, which its neighbors watched closely after the revolutions of that year. Hachures show the Alps and the Jura, the ranges that divide the two countries.

An American collector of Morse and Appleton atlases, a family with ties to Lyon or Geneva, or a student of the Second Empire will find a pointed gift here. TheMapVault's Mitchell sheet of 1860 shows France with Spain and Portugal and insets of Switzerland and Corsica, and Cram's 1883 map is a plainer single-country view; this Morse map is the one that pairs France with Switzerland on a hand-colored sheet and shows the Alpine frontier between them. It is also the earliest of the American atlas maps in this France group. 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.