Old Map of Essex in 1665 by Joan Blaeu - Colchester, Chelmsford, Basildon, Southend, North London

Joan Blaeu inherited the great Amsterdam mapmaking business founded by his father Willem and pushed it to its most spectacular expression in the Atlas Maior, a multi-volume world atlas published in several editions through the 1660s that stood as the largest and most lavish atlas ever printed at the time. Its volume devoted to England and Wales reworked the county surveys originally compiled by Christopher Saxton nearly a century earlier, but re-engraved them in the elaborate Dutch Golden Age style Blaeu's workshop was famous for, adding decorative title cartouches, coats of arms, and sea monsters and sailing ships filling any open water. This 1665 Essex sheet is a fine example of that transformation, taking an English survey and turning it into a decorative object as much as a working document.

Blaeu's engravers laid out the county with Colchester, England's oldest recorded town and a former Roman capital, given particular prominence, alongside Chelmsford as the county town and Basildon's parish marked well before it existed as the postwar new town later built around it. Southend appears still as a small settlement on the Thames estuary rather than the resort it would later become, and the map's northern edge brushes against the fringe of London itself, taking in villages that today sit inside the city's northeastern suburbs. Braintree, the River Blackwater, and the marshy Dengie peninsula round out a sheet that captures Essex just before the county's landscape began to be reshaped by later drainage and enclosure.

Collectors of Dutch Golden Age cartography prize Blaeu's county maps precisely for this combination of English geographic content and continental decorative flair, and this Essex sheet is a strong example of the type for anyone building a collection around the Atlas Maior. It also works well for Essex family historians who want to see their county as it was mapped for a European audience in the seventeenth century, long before the county town boundaries familiar today took shape. The print is reproduced at high resolution to preserve the fine engraved detail of the cartouche and coastline, and it comes in multiple sizes to suit anything from a small study to a larger feature wall.