Mapping the Past

This striking collection of hand-drawn early 19th-century topographical observations has had me delving into the history of cartography. It's only in relatively recent history that relief shading developed as a method for representing the terrain in a natural, aesthetic and intuitive manner. Although examples of relief shading date back to the 17th century, it did not become widely used until the latter part of the 19th century, with the sophisticated and influential work of Fridolin Becker (1854–1922), inventor of the so-called 'Swiss Style' shaded relief map.