1933 Jeffay Pictorial Map of Paris, France

This is a 1933 Paul Jeffay rare pictorial map of Paris, France, created to support out-of-work artists during the Great Depression (1929 - 1939).

A Closer Look

Vignettes illustrate Paris' rich arts community. Painters appear in various neighborhoods, including Montmartre, Parc Monceau, and Montparnasse, where the Jeffay himself paints a nude. The chaos of Paris is conveyed by the narrow roads and vignettes of auto accidents spotted throughout. The Eiffel Tower, the Trocadero, the Louvre (complete with an illustration of the Mona Lisa), and the Arc de Triomphe welcome viewers to the Paris of daydreams. Clowns dance, a giraffe wears a top hat in the Jardin des Plantes, and the devil (who appears in several places around town) chases a nude woman through Père Lachaise. A sign in front of the École Militaire (a French military academy not far from the Eiffel Tower) reads 'Closed due to Eternal Peace'. The whole is surrounded by a pictorial border composed of street scenes with Paris gendarmes as angels. The detail present here is fantastic and one will never tire of looking for new details.

20th Century Pictorial Cartography

Pictorial qualities have been common in cartography from at least from the 16th century when publishers like Braun and Hogenberg incorporated view-like qualities and other pictorial elements into their famous city plans. Braun and Hogenberg, and similar cartographers, issued their town books to express, not necessarily the geography of their subjects, but rather the 'essence' of the town/city. As mathematics and surveying principles became more advanced, travel increased, and the ability to translate 2 dimensional cartographic perspectives into an understanding of the actual world became commonplace, maps themselves transformed. This trend is a recognizable progression that evolved cartographic conventions from the 17th to the 19th centuries. By the late 19th century most maps had become geographical tools that illustrated the region cartographically but failed in the original raison d'être as expressed by Braun and Hogenberg, to illustrate a place's 'essence'. So, where a city map of 19th century Paris might provide a completely navigable presentation of the city, one could glean almost nothing of Paris' character from it. In the late 18th century, the first modern 'pictorial' style maps developed. These maps, like Tomas Lopez's 1788 map of Seville, attempted to provide both cartographic accuracy and pictorial elements that might convey the character of the city. In that case, Lopez incorporated pictorial vignettes to illustrate important buildings and monuments. This style became increasingly common throughout the 19th century and early 20th centuries, particularly for centers of commerce like London, Paris, and Rome, where they are often mass produced and referred to as 'monumental' maps. The style further evolved in the early to mid-20th century, when revolutionary cartographers and illustrators like MacDonald Gill, Jo Mora, Frank Dorn, Ernest Dudley Chase, and many others, combined vignette style illustrations, modern printing techniques, inspiration from Japanese printmaking and manga, and from clever satirical cartographers/artists like Fred Rose, to produce maps that once again focused on revealing the essence a place, usually, but not always, at the sacrifice of cartographic precision.

Publication History and Census

This map was created by Paul Jeffay and published by Mourlot Frères in 1933. We note a single example cataloged in OCLC, located at the National Library of Scotland.