Old Map of Hertfordshire in 1665 by Joan Blaeu - Stevenage, St Albans, Watford, Enfield, Barnet, Hatfield, Hemel Hempstead

This map of Hertfordshire was created by the celebrated Amsterdam mapmaker Joan Blaeu and originally published in 1665 in his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Sive Atlas Novus, one of the great atlases produced by the Blaeu family workshop during the seventeenth century. Blaeu's maps were prized for their full colour printing, fine engraving and decorative presentation, and this Hertfordshire sheet is a genuinely rare survival from that tradition, hand-coloured at the time of its original publication. Produced in Amsterdam rather than in England, it reflects the period when Dutch cartographers and publishers led the world in map production, drawing on English surveys but presenting them with a distinctly continental style of engraving and colouring. As a mid-seventeenth-century view of the county, it predates almost all of the county maps more commonly seen today by well over a century and a half, a genuinely scarce piece from an era when hand-coloured county maps of this quality were produced in far smaller numbers than the mass-printed atlases of the following two centuries.

The sheet covers Hertfordshire's towns as they stood in the mid-seventeenth century, including Stevenage, St Albans, Watford, Enfield, Barnet, Hatfield and Hemel Hempstead. Each is marked in the careful, decorative style typical of Blaeu's workshop, with the county set within its wider surroundings rather than isolated on the page, giving a sense of how these towns related to one another and to the roads connecting them at the time. As a full-colour engraving, the map presents this network of towns with a level of decorative detail — bordered by ornamental cartouche work typical of Dutch atlas maps of the period — that is quite different from the plainer, more functional county maps produced in England during the following two centuries.

This seventeenth-century view sits well apart from our other Hertfordshire listing, the Old Map of Hertfordshire in 1844 by Samuel Lewis, which was produced almost two hundred years later as part of a Victorian topographical atlas and shows the county on the eve of the railway age. Where the Lewis map reflects an industrial, rapidly changing nineteenth-century Hertfordshire, this Blaeu sheet captures the county as it stood in the mid-1600s, under Stuart rule, in the decorative continental style of the Dutch Golden Age of cartography — genuinely different in both period and character rather than simply an older edition of the same map. It makes a fitting gift for anyone who has recently moved to Hertfordshire and wants a sense of the county's much older history, or for a collector assembling county maps across several centuries. Every print is supplied unframed and available in our full range of sizes, to suit anywhere from a compact hallway to a large study wall.