Such exhibits, supplemental as they were to stage production with Alpine scenery, focused attention directly on the mountains themselves. Here was no posturing hero, no swooning heroine, no incidental music or even plot. It was topography alone, a novelty, and the public liked it. Relief maps are intended to represent a portion of ground in a fashion true to nature. In the glacier garden at Lucerne one can still see the earliest triangulated map of the Alps, made by Lieut.
The plan is so minutely exact that it takes in not only all the mountains, lakes, rivers, towns, villages, and forests, but every cottage, every torrent, every bridge, and even every cross is distinctly and accurately represented.
Although the relief was not completed until , during the period Weiss brought out sheets of his Atlas of Switzerland 16 sheets, 1: ,βmade from the relief, as was then the custom, contour sheets not appearing until a later time , the best topographical representation of that country for a generation. In Meyer sold the relief to the French government for 25, francs, and Napoleon installed it at St.
This he did in the summer of , when he was the first to reach the Jungfraujoch and the Mathildenspitze Sattelknopf. Gotthard group. The models of Mont Blanc, sold for the high price of thirty louis, were made of wood, the snows and pastures being shown in their natural colours and the glaciers represented by fragments of spar tinted sky-blue.
In , J. Troye, of 30 Frith Street, Soho, who advertised himself as a pupil of Exchaquet, and had probably been his workman, was offering for sale small models of Mont Blanc; and also exhibiting the Mountains of Swisserland at the Museum, Piccadilly, a series of carved reliefs, as described in his booklet, A Short Account of Mont Blanc and the Valley of Chamouni:. Troye, who resided purposely on the spot, and who was Pupil to the celebrated Exchaquet, Draftsman to his Majesty the King of Sardinia.
