'The Cornice Road between Nice and Genoa'

Bookseller Notes

A very accomplished travel album, from the first quarter of the nineteenth century, illustrating scenes from La Grande Corniche.The term 'corniche' is now applied to any coastal highway in the Francophone world, but La Grande Corniche, as depicted in this album, is the road between the French and Italian Riviera. Now a classic route, it was built by Napoleon I as a military road, created from existing tracks and pathways. As France opened up to British tourism in the early nineteenth-century, the road began to be established as a worthwhile destination, initially for the adventurous, and later for the luxurious traveller. As Frederick Treves' puts it in his evocative Riviera of the Corniche Road (1921): 'It is cut out, as a mere thread, upon the side of a mountain range which is thrown into as many drooping folds as is a vast curtain gathered up into a fraction of its width. It is never monotonous, never, indeed, even straight. It winds in and out of many a valley, it skirts many a fearful gorge, it clings to the flank of many a treacherous slope. Here it creeps beneath a jutting crag, there it mounts in the sunlight over a radiant hill or dips into the silence of a rocky glen [...] From its eyrie it looks down upon a scene of amazing enchantment, upon the foundations of the everlasting hills, upon a sea glistening like opal, upon a coast with every fantastic variation of crag and cliff, of rounded bay and sparkling beach, of wooded glen and fern-decked, murmuring chine. Here are bright villas by the water's edge, a white road that wanders as aimlessly along as a dreaming child, a town or two, and a broad harbour lined with trees. Far away are daring capes, two little islands, and a line of hills so faint as to be almost unreal.'These are the scenes captured beautifully in the present album; sweeping coastal vistas, boats in harbour, chapels clinging to cliff edges. It represents the work of a skilled artist, able to meld architectural and landscape details with ease. Scenes include: Nice (Maison Barras and Inner Harbour); Venti Miglia; Roquebrun, Menton, Loano, as well as several scenes 'between Alassio and Oneglia' and the spectacular views over Genoa from the winding hillside road. The album is light on text, but includes the occasional incidental detail: in a precipitous stretch near Loano: 'A carriage fell near here'. Many of the scenes contain artfully rusticated details of costume, but they faithfully depicting the landscapes and settlements as they were at this time.We have been unable to trace the artist, but these scenes were evidently produced as a discrete series as part of more extensive travels within continental Europe; the album also contains a loosely inserted sketch of the German valley of Calmbach (to the west of Stuttgart). Closer to home, another loose water-colour is in the distinctly muted palate of an English autumn; it shows two country gentlemen in top hats and great coats, conversing in the countryside.