Large 1948 Pictorial Map of the Cambridge University with All College Arms and Buildings in Bird’s-Eye View, First Printing on Heavy Paper in Rich Color.
Cambridge: “This immense & glorious work of fine intelligence”.
$650
1 in stock
Description
This spectacular pictorial poster map of Cambridge, drawn by Kerry Lee and published in 1948 by Pictorial Maps Ltd. for the Travel Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is among the most richly populated of all British pictorial maps — a composition that manages to be simultaneously a bird’s-eye view of the university’s buildings, a heraldic chart of its colleges, and a portrait gallery of eight centuries of Cambridge intellectual life. The map’s subtitle, borrowed from an early description of the university — This immense & glorious work of fine intelligence — sets the tone precisely: Lee’s image is as much a celebration as a document, a deliberate act of cultural pride produced in the difficult years of postwar reconstruction. Original first printings of 1948, on heavier paper with the soft, saturated palette of Chromoworks’ finest production, are now scarce.
The Map in Detail
The pictorial view presents Cambridge from an elevated vantage point to the northwest, the River Cam threading through the composition and the college courts, chapels, and lawns rendered in Lee’s warm, exuberant style. The familiar silhouettes of King’s College Chapel, the Senate House, St. John’s, Trinity, and the round tower of the University Library anchor the composition, while the surrounding colleges — Christ’s, Emmanuel, Corpus Christi, Magdalene, Pembroke, Peterhouse, Gonville & Caius, Queens’, St. Catharine’s, Selwyn, Newnham, and others — are all depicted and labeled.
The borders constitute a separate work within the work. Along the top and bottom runs a full parade of college arms, each with its founding date, from Peterhouse (1281) through the medieval foundations to Downing (1800) and Selwyn (1882), flanked at the four corners by the arms of the City and University. The left and right margins and the lower border are densely populated with named historical figures, each depicted in period dress: founders and patrons (Lady Margaret Beaufort, Edmund Gonville, John Fisher, Elizabeth de Burgh, Walter Mildmay), poets and writers (Milton, Dryden, Tennyson, Byron, Marlowe, Coleridge, Thomas Hardy), scientists (Newton, Darwin), statesmen (Cromwell, Lord Brooke, the Bacons father and son), churchmen (Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, Bishop Selwyn), and transatlantic connections — John Harvard, Henry Dunster (first president of Harvard University), and the Mayflower pastor John Robinson all appear. Lee has depicted himself in the lower right corner, pen in hand, signing the map.
Historical Context
Kerry Lee’s Cambridge map appeared in 1948, three years after the end of the Second World War, in a Britain engaged in the simultaneous tasks of economic recovery and cultural self-definition. Published for the Travel Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland — the body responsible for promoting British tourism and national prestige abroad — the map is an explicitly patriotic document, presenting Cambridge as an unbroken thread of intellectual achievement running from the medieval foundations to the twentieth century. The roster of figures Lee depicts reads as an argument: that Cambridge, and by extension Britain, had produced the minds that shaped the modern world.
Lee’s style is deeply indebted to the tradition established by MacDonald Gill, whose pictorial maps of London, the British Empire, and the English countryside had defined the genre in the interwar years. Lee took that inheritance and inflected it with a postwar warmth — richer color, a denser figure population, a slightly more antiquarian tone — that suited the mood of a country looking both backward to its greatness and forward to its recovery. The Cambridge map was issued alongside companion maps of London, Oxford, and Stratford-upon-Avon as part of a series. The Chromoworks printing house, one of the finest color printers in Britain, ensured the production quality matched the ambition of the design.
Publication History and Census
Drawn by Kerry Lee. Published by Pictorial Maps Ltd., Blandford Studio, 71 Blandford Street, London, W.1, for the Travel Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Tourist Division of the British Tourist and Holidays Board), Queen’s House, St. James’s Street, London, S.W.1. Printed by Chromoworks Ltd., Great Britain. Copyright in all countries. Part of a series that also included London, Oxford, and Stratford-upon-Avon. First issued 1948. Later folding editions were produced in the 1960s on lighter paper with a somewhat different color register; the present example is an early printing on heavier stock with the full depth of color characteristic of the first issue. Examples in this condition are scarce on the market.
Cartographer(s):
Kerry Lee (Walthamstow, 4 December 1902 – Hemel Hempstead, February 1988) was a British commercial artist and pictorial cartographer who came to mapmaking by an unlikely route. He studied painting in Paris as a young man but spent much of the 1920s working as an estate agent and draughtsman before establishing himself as a commercial illustrator at Blandford Studio off Baker Street in the mid-1930s. During the Second World War he was attached to Air Intelligence, producing classified cut-away drawings of German Luftwaffe aircraft for MI6. Returning to Blandford Street in 1946, he spent six months on London — Bastion of Liberty, the first of the large pictorial poster maps that would define his career. The Travel Association series — London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Stratford-upon-Avon, all published in 1948 — were distributed through American stores as part of a government campaign to attract US tourists and generate foreign currency in the postwar austerity years. He subsequently produced maps of Birmingham, Liverpool, and other cities, publishing through his own Pictorial Maps Ltd. A committed socialist and CND supporter in private life, he invariably signed his maps with a small self-portrait of himself accompanied by his dog Jim.
Condition Description
Offset lithograph printed on thick paper. Some staining along the left margin.
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