Colton Front

Colton Frontispiece
Notecards

Notecard Size: 5 x 7 in.

Price: Individual card with envelope, $2.00.

Packet of six with envelopes, $10.00.

Text on Back: "G. Woolworth Colton and Richard Swainson Fisher. Colton's General Atlas. New York: G.W. & C.B. Colton & Co., 1868.

This frontispiece from Colton's General Atlas was drawn by Frederic A. Chapman (1818-1891), a Connecticut-born portrait, historical and landscape painter who settled in Brooklyn in 1851, and later became the first president of the Brooklyn Art Association. The objects in the foreground of the image, which include an artist's palette and a compass, seem to suggest the idea of cartography as both an art and a science. The female figures may symbolize "muses" of the arts and sciences, surveying a world where, according to the publishers' introductory statement, "...new and importants events are attracting attention to almost every quarter." In this era of westward expansion, population migration, advances in science, and growth in business and industry, the publishers "resolved to make their 'General Atlas,' in authenticity, in completeness, and in artistic perfection, a publication worthy of an enlightened patronage."