This rare pictorial map by Peter R. Furse celebrates the history of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It was produced with the cooperation of the RCMP, as acknowledged in an elegant cartouche at bottom right. The landscape is filled with charming illustrations of Mounties in action along with extensive notes on the history of the police force. At bottom left there is a legend surrounded by native flora that identifies forts, posts, detachments, air and marine division bases, and "whiskey forts." Important events in RCMP history are depicted in vignettes at left and right and along the border. The RCMP Musical Ride gallops across northern Quebec, and the Arctic Circle is imaginatively represented by chains of dog sled teams. The badge of the RCMP hovers at the top of the map. Published by the Maclean-Hunter Publishing Company Limited.
This map is from the estate of artist and cartographer Peter R. Furse (1901-70). Furse was born 1901 in Farnham, Surrey, England. During World War I, he enlisted in the Royal Navy. He worked as a cartographer and graduated from Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, in 1922. He moved to Africa and was stationed in Cape Town, South Africa during World War II. It was during his time in Africa that Furse began to make pictorial maps. His family relocated to North America, eventually settling in New Brunswick, Canada in 1962. Once there, he became an active member of the "Hampton Group" artists' community and continued to work on his art until his death in 1970. Furse's terrific style mixes a 20th-century graphic sensibility with an uncommon elegance that hearkens back to the aesthetics of previous centuries of mapmaking.
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