Code: 53363
Author: Hall, Sidney
Date published: 1840
Steel engraving with original hand colouring. Overall size 61.3cms x 50.3cms; image size: 511mm x 411mm. Piano key border. Finely engraved map with mountain ranges delineated with hachures, towns, rivers, lakes marked. The cantons listed in key top right with the religion of each, the Canton borders outlined in bright original hand colour on the map. Centrefold as published, small nick extreme bottom margin edge well away from map itself, some browning to margin and one faint fox spot bottom blank (between U and S of Austria) and one faint offset line in blank of German States else very good condition. Sidney Hall was an engraver, cartographer and copperplate printer. Worms and Baynton-Williams state in,'British Map Engravers' that Hall was almost certainly the first engraver to use the new harder steel plates for map work, using plates manufactured by the Jacob Perkins process as early as 1821. He died at the age of forty two and his widow Selina Hall, continued the business, her practice of signing her engravings simply as,'S.Hall' has caused much confusion among bibliographers.
