Montreal. (from the St. Lawrence.)

Title

Montreal. (from the St. Lawrence.)

Description

View shows the city of Montreal with the parish church Notre-Dame de Montréal in Canada. In the foreground on the St Lawrence River, magnificent sailing ships and a raft lie in front of the city.

c. 1841

Artist

Bartlett (1809-1854)

William Henry Bartlett (1809 – 1854) was a British artist, best known for his numerous steel engravings. The finely detailed steel engravings Bartlett produced were published uncolored with a text by Nathaniel Parker Willis as American Scenery. Bartlett made sepia wash drawings the exact size to be engraved. His engraved views were widely copied by artists, but no signed oil painting by his hand is known. Engravings based on Bartlett's views were later used in his posthumous History of the United States of North America, continued by Bernard Bolingbroke Woodward and published around 1856.

Historical Description

The earliest evidence of human presence in what is now the province of Québec is around ten millennia ago. As early as 5000 BC The main points of cultural development at the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River can be identified (Proto-Laurentian). This developed into a large-scale regional culture known as the Middle Great Lakes-St. Lawrence culture is called. The name of the city of Montreal is derived from Mont Royal (French: "royal mountain"). It was named after Jacques Cartier, who discovered the striking range of hills on the island in 1535 and named it in honor of King François I. When the Venetian cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi made a map based on Cartier's notes in 1556 for the book series Navigationi et Viaggi published by Giovan Battista Ramusio, he gave the range of hills the name Monte Real. François de Belleforest was the first to use the name form Montréal derived from it in La Cosmographie universelle de tout le monde, his cosmography published in 1575. After the appearance of a map made by Samuel de Champlain in 1612, the name was carried over to the entire island. The first French settlement on the island, founded in 1642, was called Ville-Marie. This name was gradually supplanted by Montréal and fell out of use in the first half of the 18th century.