Name: La Crimée à vol d'oiseau.
SKU: NL-02659
Availability: InStock

Rare 1855 Bird’s-Eye-View of the Crimean Peninsula, Published During the Siege of Sevastopol.

La Crimée à vol d’oiseau.

$3,500

1 in stock

SKU: NL-02659 Categories: Europe, Russia & Eastern Europe Tag: EUROPE

Cartographer(s): Etienne Eugène Cicéri , Imprimerie Lemercier , Philippe Benoist

Date: 1855

Place: Paris

Dimensions: 106 x 71.75 cm (41.75 x 28.25 inches)

Condition Rating: VG

Description

Description

The Peninsula Where Empires Clashed.

This spectacular bird’s-eye lithograph of the Crimean Peninsula was drawn and lithographed by Philippe Benoist and Eugène Cicéri, published in 1855 by Goupil & Co. in Paris, London, and Berlin, and printed by the celebrated Parisian house of Lemercier. Its full title declares its authority: the view was compiled from plans and drawings taken simultaneously by order of the English, French, and Russian governments, making it the only cartographic image of the war produced from the official surveys of all three principal belligerents. It appeared in the final year of the Crimean War, while the Siege of Sevastopol was still underway, and public appetite for accurate visual information about the peninsula was at its peak.

The Map in Detail

The view presents the entire Crimean Peninsula from a dramatically elevated vantage point above the Black Sea, looking northward across the mountainous southern coast toward the flat steppe of the interior and the narrow Strait of Perekop, which connects the peninsula to the Russian mainland. The contrast between the two landscapes is the image’s most arresting visual feature: the jagged Crimean Mountains running along the southern shore, rendered with deep atmospheric shading, give way abruptly to the open, road-crossed plateau of the north. Sevastopol is prominently labeled on the western coast, its position at the head of a deep natural harbor making its strategic importance immediately legible.

The southern coastal strip records Yalta, Alushta, Aloupka, and a succession of named capes (Chersonèse, Fiolent, Aia, Aithéodore, Sarytch, Lambat) while the roads and military routes crossing the interior are clearly traced. A small legend in the lower left distinguishes the positions or routes of the English, French, and Russian forces.

Historical Context

The Crimean War of 1853 to 1856, fought between Russia and an alliance of Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire, was the most closely followed conflict in Europe since the Napoleonic Wars, and the first to be reported in near-real time through photography, illustrated newspapers, and the electric telegraph. The Siege of Sevastopol, which began in October 1854 and lasted nearly a year until the city fell in September 1855, was its central event, and the battles of Balaklava and Inkerman, fought on the hills visible on this view, had made the Crimean landscape intimately familiar to newspaper readers across Europe.

Goupil & Co., the most internationally connected art publisher of the mid-nineteenth century, with galleries in Paris, London, New York, and Berlin, recognized the commercial and documentary potential of a definitive bird’s-eye view of the theater of war. Benoist, celebrated for his architectural and topographic panoramas, and Cicéri, one of the finest landscape lithographers of his generation, were the natural choices to execute it.

The collaboration of official surveys from three governments at war, a practicality made possible by the diplomatic complexities of the conflict and the shared interest in accurate military mapping, gave the resulting image a cartographic authority that purely commercial views of the war could not match. Lemercier’s printing house, the leading lithographic printer in Paris, ensured that the technical execution met the standard the subject demanded.

Publication History and Census

Published simultaneously in Paris, London, and Berlin by Goupil & Co. and E. Gambart & Co. in 1855, and printed by the Imprimerie Lemercier in Paris. Institutional holdings appear limited to approximately six examples worldwide, with two located in the United States, two in France, one in Spain, and a possible further example in Poland.

Cartographer(s):

Etienne Eugène Cicéri

Étienne Eugène Cicéri (January 27, 1813 – April 20, 1890) was a French painter, illustrator, engraver, and theater designer who was active in the middle part of the 19th century. Cicéri was born in Paris, the son and pupil of the painter and scenographer Pierre-Luc-Charles Cicéri (1782 – 1868). His instruction in art began as a child under his father and uncle, Eugène Isabey (1803 – 1886). Influenced by the Barbizon School of landscape art, he rose to prominence as a landscape painter and watercolorist, working at Fontainebleau, the Alps, and the Pyrenees. He exhibited at the Paris Salon for the first time in 1851 and continued to exhibit until at least 1886. He also issued North African landscapes and painted scenes to illustrate the travels of Jules Sébastien César Dumont d’Urville’s (1790 – 1842) circumnavigation.

Imprimerie Lemercier

The Imprimerie Lemercier was one of the great lithographic printing houses of nineteenth-century Paris, and the firm most responsible for establishing chromolithography as a medium capable of genuine artistic and scientific ambition. It was founded by Joseph Lemercier (1803–1887), who had trained as a lithographer and opened his own establishment in Paris in the late 1820s.

Lemercier grasped early that lithography’s potential went far beyond the reproduction of drawings: in close collaboration with chemists, artists, and publishers, he developed and refined chromolithographic techniques that allowed complex color work to be produced at a quality previously achievable only by hand. His firm printed for the leading Parisian map publishers — Andriveau-Goujon among them — as well as for natural history, archaeological, and architectural publications where the accurate reproduction of color was scientifically essential.

By mid-century, the Imprimerie Lemercier had become the default choice for any Parisian publisher whose work demanded the highest standards of color lithographic printing, a reputation it maintained through the end of the century.

Philippe Benoist

Philippe Benoist (b. Geneva, 1813; active Paris through c. 1879) was a draughtsman and lithographer who trained under Louis Daguerre — the inventor of the daguerreotype — and made his career producing large-scale topographic and architectural views of European cities. He was among the first practitioners in France to use photography as an explicit aid to lithographic drawing, a working method acknowledged on the title page of his most celebrated project, Paris dans sa Splendeur (1861), where the drawings and lithographs are credited to Benoist avec l’aide de la photographie. That publication, a comprehensive lithographic documentation of Haussmann-era Paris, established Benoist as the foremost practitioner of the architectural panorama in mid-nineteenth century France. His earlier work includes Vues d’Italie et de Sicile (1848) and collaborations with the leading Parisian print houses of the period. The Crimean Peninsula view of 1855, on which he collaborated with Cicéri, belongs to the same tradition of large-scale topographic lithography applied to a subject of immediate public consequence.