John Tallis

Italian Opera House. View on Haymarket.

 To commemorate the Great Exhibition of 1851,  in London publisher John Tallis issued Tallis’s Illustrated London, a combined historical guidebook and exhibition souvenir. Most of the plates had been engraved by Albert Henry Payne for a previous Illustrated London prepared four years earlier for publisher E.T. Brain and may have been based on initial drawings by Payne who was also a successful artist with studios in London and in Leipzig. Tallis had acquired the business of Brain and with it 189 of Payne’s engravings. Payne’s plates had the considerable advantage of not having been issued with publication lines and with the engravers’ credits appearing only rarely. To this collection Tallis added 44 anonymous views to match those of Payne.

Although, most of the views measure no more than 3 ¾” x 2 ¾”, they successfully impart the contemporary grandeur and scale of London’s impressive architecture and natural beauty, bathed in a storm light to which Payne was particular. It is the very smallness of size, accuracy of detail and romantic appeal that continues to make Tallis’s Illustrated London widely admired today.