France Map 1622 Dutch Decorative Atlas Print - Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Toulouse

Jodocus Hondius is named on this Nova Totius Galliae Geographica Descriptio, whose title carries the year 1600, and this Amsterdam printing is the first state with the Hondius imprint and the date 1622 in the cartouche; Hondius himself had died in 1612, and his sons ran the house. He was one of the most prominent geographers and engravers of his time, and one of his most successful ventures was reprinting Mercator's atlas, to which he added 36 maps. This map appeared in only four editions of Mercator's atlas and is therefore very rare, and this is the special printing that Hondius shipped to Tavernier in Paris for sale, as a box beside the scale reading Se vend aussi à Paris shows. The design is richly ornamented with a huge strapwork title cartouche, a coat of arms, sailing ships, a sea monster and a compass rose, and it shows France in 1622, while Louis XIII was fighting the Huguenot strongholds of the south.

The title of the map promises that every archbishopric, bishopric, university and parlement is marked with its own sign, collated from the provincial descriptions that existed at the time. That makes it a map of authority as well as of geography: the parlements sat in cities such as Paris, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Rouen, and the bishops and universities gave the kingdom its religious and learned structure. The Seine, the Loire, the Garonne and the Rhône are the great rivers that join the regions, and the sailing ships and the sea monster fill the Channel and the Atlantic. The Paris sales box shows a Dutch design made to be sold to French buyers. It records a kingdom still divided into provinces, in a style that was already becoming old-fashioned.

A collector of early Dutch cartography, a family with deep roots in Paris, or an admirer of Mercator's atlas will find a historically significant gift here. TheMapVault's Seutter map of 1727 is a baroque Augsburg France, and the Lotter sheet of about 1760 celebrates the conquests of Louis XIV, whereas this 1622 Hondius is more than a century older than the Seutter and was a Dutch printing made for sale in Paris itself. 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.