Ambroise Tardieu
Encyclopedia
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
cartographer
Cartography
Cartography is the study and practice of making maps. Combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.The fundamental problems of traditional cartography are to:*Set the map's...
and engraver
Engraving
Engraving is the practice of incising a design on to a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing...
, and is celebrated for his version of John Arrowsmith
John Arrowsmith (cartographer)
John Arrowsmith was an English geographer and member of the Arrowsmith family of geographers. He was born at Winston, County Durham....
's 1806 map of the United States. Tardieu's son, Auguste Ambroise Tardieu
Auguste Ambroise Tardieu
Auguste Ambroise Tardieu was a French medical doctor and the pre-eminent forensic medical scientist of the mid-19th century.Tardieu's specialties were forensic medicine and toxicology...
(1818–1879), was also an artist and a famous forensic medical scholar, who supplied the illustrations for Dr. Pierre François Olive Rayer
Pierre François Olive Rayer
Pierre François Olive Rayer was a French physician who was a native of Saint Sylvain. He made important contributions in the fields of pathological anatomy, physiology, comparative pathology and parasitology....
's three-volume Traité des maladies des reins (1839–41), a treatise on diseases of the kidneys. Neither should be confused with Jean Baptiste Pierre Tardieu, an unrelated French cartographer and engraver active in the early 19th century.
Tardieu came from a family boasting a number of fine engravers, and was trained from an early age by his uncle, Pierre Alexandre Tardieu
Pierre Alexandre Tardieu
Pierre Alexandre Tardieu was a French engraver. He was a member of the Institut de France, the Saint Petersburg Academy and the Academy of Milan. His students included Auguste Gaspard Louis Desnoyers...
(1756–1844), a leading French engraver. Showing considerable talent in this field, Ambroise persevered and became a celebrated engraver of portraits. In addition he was appointed as geographical engraver for the French government, for which he received a small stipend. In order to eke out this meagre wage, he began to trade in prints, books and maps. He is remembered for more than 800 portraits engraved through his career, many depicting scientists of the period.
Tardieu published a number of atlas
Atlas
An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a map of Earth or a region of Earth, but there are atlases of the other planets in the Solar System. Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in multimedia formats...
es, one of which appeared in 1842 and was titled Atlas universel de geographie, ancienne et moderne/dresse par Ambroise Tardieu pour l'intelligence de la Geographie universelle par Malte-Brun.