Designed and Drawn With Infinite Care: the Pictorial Maps of Ernest Dudley Chase
By: Jason Forrest
Tags: Information Design, Illustration, Maps, Dataviz, Dvhistory

There’s really nothing as visually satisfying as a pictorial map. Each densely packed, illustrated map is a visual feast for the eyes; a fusion of illustration, editorial copy, and cartographic skill. The pictorial map had its heyday from the 1930–60s and eventually fell out of the public eye with the advancement of color photography.

“Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps” by Stephen J. Hornsby

The 2016 book “Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps” by Stephen J. Hornsby helps bring many of these unsung artists back to the fore. Hornsby explores the massive collection held by the Library of Congress and not only tells the story of the discipline but also outlines the biographies of many of its practitioners. The book is a must-buy; each lusciously illustrated map reveals more on each viewing and Hornsby is a storyteller who is clearly passionate about representing such under-explored works.

Of course, illustrations have occurred in maps since the very beginning of map making, but pictorial maps push the boundaries of supplemental information, by inserting thumbnail size illustrations into any empty space. Though inspired by the work of MacDonald Gill in London, Horsnby argues that the maximalist cartography genre is inherently American in nature — an unlikely by-product of an incredibly skilled workforce of illustrators, innovations in off-set printing, and American optimism. The pictorial map is inherently entertaining, a mixture of marketing, hucksterism and graphical brilliance. Each map a brazen declaration by showboat illustrators begging to be viewed.

While many of these artists are not well-known, the hands-down most famous of the bunch is Ernest Dudely Chase.

Portrait of Ernest Dudley Chase From “A Meticulous Maker of Maps” By Tim Thrift, David Rumsey Map Collection link

A proud resident of Winchester, Massachusetts, Chase began his carer illustrating greeting cards and went on to become very well known in the industry. Culminating in 1925, when he published “The Romance of Greeting Cards” which became a sort of industry bible. Then, at the age of 49, Chase began his first pictorial map of Germany. An immensely talented illustrator who loved to travel, Chase chose the pictorial map to tell the stories and point out the landmarks of the places he’d visited on his travels.

Hornsby writes “Chase crafted his maps with care, each taking from six months to a year to complete. He worked with a magnifying glass, inking in, dot by dot, the tiny scenes that covered many of his maps. These stamp-sized scenes were based on his own sketches, still and motion picture collection (he reputedly shot an estimated one hundred thousand feet of cine-film), post-cards, and other illustrative materials.”

By the mid-40’s Chase had enough maps to fill his own mail-order catalog. The maps came in 3 varieties: full color, in sepia with colored compass, and black on ivory paper. They even came in a decorative tube and Chase would throw in autographed versions for $1.50.