Nice, Villefranche and Cannes from the Sea

The artwork

Bottom centre, in the last view, the low island with a row of pale buildings is Sainte-Marguerite, opposite Cannes: the Man in the Iron Mask spent eleven years there. You receive it printed on handmade Amalfi paper, in a handmade frame.

• Nice, Villefranche and Cannes seen from the sea, hand-coloured.
• In a bedroom or a bright hallway it keeps summer on the wall all year round.
• A gift for anyone who spends the summer on the French Riviera.

The prisoner arrived on 30 April 1687 with his gaoler, Saint-Mars, after a journey from Exilles in the Alps, shut inside a sedan chair covered with oilcloth; Saint-Mars wrote that he complained of not having enough air. In 1698 Saint-Mars took him along to the Bastille, where the prisoner died in 1703: who he really was is still unknown. The mask was black velvet; it was Voltaire who turned it into iron. The story goes that the prisoner scratched something on a silver plate and threw it from the window; a fisherman brought it back to the governor, who held the fisherman until he was sure the man had not read it, then sent him off: “You are lucky not to know how to read.”

The view comes from The Little Sea Torch, which John Thomas Serres published in London in 1801 by translating and enlarging René Bougard's Le Petit Flambeau de la Mer, the “little torch of the sea”, which went through fourteen editions between 1684 and 1817. It is a hand-coloured aquatint: at the top, Nice and the lighthouse of “Villa Franca”, that is Villefranche; in the middle, the same lighthouse with the entrance to Monaco, which in 1801 was French and called Fort d'Hercule. The sheet reproduced here is in the David Rumsey Map Collection at Stanford.

In a bedroom or a bright hallway, it is a gift for anyone who spends the summer on the Côte d'Azur or has read Dumas under a beach umbrella. And out there on the island, that silver plate is still waiting for someone who can read.

Unique quality material

Print on handmade Amalfi paper
Sheet size: 29 x 42 cm (11.4 x 16.5 in)
With frame: 31 x 44 cm (12.2 x 17.3 in)
Material: artwork printed on very fine handmade Amalfi paper with deckled edges
Frame: dark brown with gold fillet, handmade, with glass