France Map 1727 Baroque Atlas Print - Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux

Matthäus Seutter, the Augsburg engraver and publisher who trained under Johann Baptist Homann in Nuremberg before founding his own firm, issued this map of France as Gallia in his Atlas Novus, whose first issue of about 1730 carried the first title page and the first states of many of its maps. Seutter was Homann's chief German rival, and his sheets were built for show: an allegorical cartouche at lower left carries the title and a dedication in Latin, the provinces are tinted in distinct colors, and relief is sketched in small hills across a sheet of 57 by 50 centimeters at 1:2,600,000. It shows France in 1727, when Louis XV, then seventeen, reigned beside his chief minister Cardinal Fleury and the kingdom was the strongest power on the Continent.

Paris is the most prominent city, although the court lived at Versailles, to which Louis XV had returned in 1722. Gallia, the Roman name the sheet takes for the country, was the form a scholar would use in Latin, and the inscriptions suggest a learned or noble buyer rather than a traveler. The provinces such as Brittany, Normandy and Burgundy were the working divisions of the kingdom, and the Seine, the Loire, the Rhône and the Garonne shape its trade and travel. Marseille and Lyon, drawn among the major towns, were the southern port and the silk center that fed the kingdom's commerce. The sheet reads as a baroque portrait of a monarchy at the height of its prestige.

A collector of Augsburg and Nuremberg atlas work, a family from Versailles or Burgundy, or a lover of Latin and allegory will find a handsome gift here, perhaps for a milestone birthday. TheMapVault's other France maps date from 1809 onward, including Pinkerton's colored London sheet of 1809 and the Lapie map of the empire, so this Seutter sheet is the earliest France map in the group by more than eighty years and the one built around a baroque cartouche rather than period detail. Like every print in the collection, it ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes, from a compact desk piece to a large-format statement print.