Annandiae praefectura Vulgo The Stewartrie of Annandail. 

Copper engraved map, from volume 5 of Blaeu’s Atlas, outlined in colour, decorative title and scale cartouches, central vertical fold, wide margins, latin text to verso, overall size 615 x 515mm, Amsterdam, 1654.

Handsome regional map of Scotland, covering East Dumfries, Annan and Solway Firth. The original survey work of Timothy Pont (and secondarily Robert Gordon) is behind the first atlas of Scotland published by Blaeu in 1654. Pont compiled this map for Blaeu between 1583 and 1601.

Joan Blaeu was a leading Amsterdam mapmaker. His prowess was recognised in the civil offices he held: from 1638, mapmaker to the Dutch East India Company and, between 1651 and 1672, a member of Amsterdam City Council. The maps of Scotland that form part of the Atlas novus are part of a scheme for a multi-volume world atlas, a scheme hatched by Joan’s father, Willem Janszoon Blaeu.

‘Continue now, look at Scotland, and enjoy a feast for the eyes’

Blaeu writes in part of the preliminary material to his 1654 Atlas Novus. To Blaeu’s contemporaries, the vision of Scotland presented in his Atlas showed their geography laid out as never before. Accompanied by textual descriptions, travel and seeing with your own eyes was no longer always necessary, for within the map lay a visual prospect of the nation.

The Blaeu maps of Scotland are particularly scarce. Produced between 1654 and 1672, the year of the fire that destroyed the Blaeu printing house, is a much shorter period of time than most other Blaeu maps. A good copy of this scarce map.