About this sheet
The department of Vaucluse, the old Comtat Venaissin and the papal city of Avignon, with Orange, Vaison, Malaucene, Carpentras, Apt, Bonnieux, Cadenet and Pertuis named and Mont Ventoux rising in the centre of the sheet. The Rhone runs down the western side and the Durance closes the south. Two vignettes are engraved on the plate: a view of Avignon, and a portrait of Laura, the woman Petrarch saw in a church at Avignon in 1327 and wrote about for the rest of his life. Provence sells, Avignon sells, and the Petrarch association gives the sheet a literary hook that most department maps lack. It hangs very well in a room with any Provencal connection.
La France, Nouvel Atlas Illustre des Departements et des Colonies was drawn by Alexandre Vuillemin, ingenieur geographe, and published in Paris by Migeon at 9 rue de la Vieille Monnaie. Vuillemin built each sheet from the official surveys, the Cassini maps, the Depot de la Guerre, the Ponts et Chaussees and the charts of the Marine, and then framed the map with engraved vignettes: a portrait of a figure born in the department, a view of a monument or a ruin, a coat of arms. The result is part atlas and part popular encyclopaedia, and it remains one of the most decorative French departmental series of the nineteenth century.
The plates in this copy show France divided into eighty six departments and the county of Nice still outside the frontier, so the engraving was completed before the annexation of Savoy and Nice in 1860, although Migeon went on issuing the atlas for many years afterwards. The sheets suit a French interior particularly well, and a group of neighbouring departments hung together makes an attractive run.
The sheet is in good condition for its age, with light toning and scattered light foxing confined to the margins; the image itself is clean.
This is an original antique map, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed. Any framed or interior images are shown for presentation and inspiration only, unless the listing explicitly states that the item is sold framed.
