This is a guest post by Seanna Tsung, senior cataloging specialist in the Geography and Map Division, and is part of our “Fabricating the World” series.
For two and a half centuries, from about 1600 to 1850, the vast majority of European style commercial maps published in Europe and the Americas were engraved, primarily on copper plates. These maps were printed in monochrome, with the thick black printer’s ink that remained in the lines cut into the copper pressed in reverse onto the paper. Between each impression, the plates were inked and then cleaned to remove any ink on the flat surfaces of the plate, which allowed the paper to show through. Because of the specific requirements and economics of this process of map making, including the ability to add to and alter the plates, the great detail achievable, and, as time went on, the belief of the audience that this is how maps should look, most of the aesthetic developments of printing technologies seen in prints as an art form did not affect map production.
If you are a lover of printed maps from these periods and places, however, you will know that many examples are not, in fact, monochrome. Instead, they are hand painted. There are two basic types of hand painting for maps, atlases and views. The first, sometimes called “Dutch style,” uses larger areas of saturated colors, and aims for an aesthetic addition to the map or parts of it. This style is often used for title pages in atlases and for cartouches and decorative frames. Less often, it is used for an entire map or view, as in this map of Paris from Civitates orbis terrarum by Braun and Hogenberg, a six volume atlas published between 1612 and 1618.
The second general type of hand coloring used mostly pastel colors to highlight boundaries, hydrology, roads, or other features of the maps. It was used to add to or emphasize the cartographic data provided by the map rather than to fully color the image or add to the decorative qualities of the map. This is the most common type of hand coloring, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. Below is a detail of a large world map from 1754 by Nicolas de Fer, in which color is used to indicate continental and other boundaries. The mythological figures are left monochrome.
Some map publishers had colorists in house, others jobbed the work out. It is thought that a certain amount of the coloring throughout the period under discussion was done at home by women, who were mostly excluded from commercial map production unless they were daughters, wives or widows of male cartographers, engravers or publishers. Individual maps were often sold by the publishers both colored and uncolored, as were atlases, which were also often sold either unbound or in temporary bindings, with the idea that the purchasers would have them bound to their own taste.
As a purchaser of cartographic materials, you could have number of choices to make, based on pecuniary and aesthetic decisions, as well as the purpose for which the map was intended. Examples of wall maps, which do not survive in great numbers because they were often actually applied to walls or hung for long periods of time exposed to light, climate, smoke and other pollutants, generally include considerable color as they were intended to be read in large spaces. Explorers, cartographers, and scholars might prefer uncolored or lightly colored maps, in which none of the detail of the engraving would be masked by the coloring. Even luxury productions like the Civitates orbis terrarum mentioned before, which is notable for its clearly highly supervised beautiful and detailed coloring, were also sold in monochrome.
The development of commercially viable lithography starting in the mid 19th century led to the falling off of hand coloring, but this was a gradual process. The Geography and Map Division has a number of German atlases from the 1850s and 1860s which contain both hand colored engraved maps and color lithograph maps. The publishers seemed to continue to use their stock of hand colored maps until either they ran out or world events required a new map of a certain area. Hand coloring was also used on maps produced by lithography, photocopying, and others of the many printing techniques developed from the mid-19th century. Many landownership, county, and other local atlases published in the United States into the early twentieth century contained both hand colored lithographed local maps and printed color maps of states and countries.
When trying to determine whether a map has printed color or hand coloring, look at the edges of the color, as well as if there are variations in tone typical of watercolor. You see in this detail of an 1879 atlas plate of the Washington, DC region published in Philadelphia that there are variations in tone and little bumps and dashes of color beyond the printed lines.
In addition, the use of stencils for hand coloring, primarily in 19th century maps, can result in pooling of color along boundaries. If you have the map or atlas in hand, the most accurate way to determine whether the color is printed or hand painted is by using a loupe of about 10x magnification. You will see individual dots in the printed color rather than the subtle gradations of the watercolors.
Many genuine engraved maps from 1600 to 1850 were, and sometime still are, hand colored for the secondary market of map collectors, decorators and others who find maps in color more visually appealing, and would pay more for them. It is difficult for the amateur to determine whether the color was added close to the time of the map’s original publication or in the 19th or 20th century, especially as many single antiquarian maps come from disbound atlases or books, and therefore lack provenance. Without specialized knowledge of pigments and the ability to do tests on them, dating the hand coloring is virtually impossible, although the more flamboyant “Dutch style” coloring is much more likely to be a later addition than boundary coloring, which would add much less monetary and visual value.
I’d like to end with an eccentric, exuberant example of mid-19th century hand coloring, the image that begins the blog. From about 1858, it is a wall map with a North Polar projection, supposedly intended for general instruction. It is a lithographic map printed in blue, and shows both coloring indicating boundaries and decorative coloring in the figures of the times of day. We don’t know whether the cartographer did the hand coloring, or someone else unnamed. I’d ask you to, when looking at hand colored maps, keep in mind the unsung men and women who made our world a little brighter with their paintbrushes!