Map of Europe

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About Map Of Europe

Paris: Chez le fils de l'auteur Rue St.Jacques a lenseigne de la Place des Victoires, 1740. Copper-engraved wall map, with original outline colour, backed onto old linen, with contemporary wooden rollers, overall in very good condition. Sheet size: 49 x 55 inches. A rare and monumental wall map of Europe by one of the great masters of French cartography. Jean-Baptiste Nolin was one of the most accomplished and certainly the most ambitious French cartographer of his era. He founded what ultimately became a family empire in Paris in the 1680s. Exceptionally, he managed to marry superlative decorative ornamentation with the serious objective of producing maps that reflected the most advanced rendering of geographical detail. The artistic elan of his compositions evinced a style that preserved the rhetorical ambitions of the Baroque ethic, while anticipating the playful elegance of the Rococo period. His masterpieces, many like the present wall map, were monumental in scale and represented Nolin's desire to overwhelm his competition in what was a very challenging market. Highly controversial, Nolin occasionally described himself as "the Engraver to the King", an appointment of which the royal court was curiously never apprised. In his endeavor to include the very latest geographical details on his maps, he seldom hesitated to acquire information from his eminent contemporaries, most notably Guillaume De L'Isle and Vincenzo Maria Coronelli, Jean-Dominique Cassini and the Sieur de Tillemon. At times these rivals were not appreciative of Nolin's adoption of their intellectual property, and De L'Isle successfully sued Nolin for plagiarism in 1705. However, the larger-than-life Nolin always seemed to transcend these challenges, leaving a thriving enterprise to be taken up by his son. The present map was created in 1740 by Jean-Baptiste Nolin II, largely based on earlier maps produced by his father.