Historic Maps
Beautiful Early Map of “America Septentrionalis” by Lotter
c. 1760 Hand-Colored Engraved Copper Plate Double-Page Map titled, “America Septentrionalis,” Guillaume de L’Isle, Guillaume (1675-1726), Augsburg, Tobias Conrad Lotter, Choice Crisp Extremely Fine.
This is a gorgeous Map Guillaume de L’Isle’s fine Hand-colored Maps of North America, re-engraved sometime after 1757 by Georg Friedrich Lotter. Sight size measuring about 18” x 23” (585mm x 460mm) custom framed to 31.5” x 35.5” De L’Isle is recognized as “the first scientific cartographer” (Karpinski). This example has Colors strong and true with crisp impressions in excellent overall condition, presented in a handsome expensive decorative professional matting and frame (not examined out of frame).

First published in 1700, these early maps were of North and South America by French geographer Guillaume De L’Isle, “perhaps the greatest mapmaker of his time,… offered revised and more realistic concepts of both the Mississippi River and the western coast of America than those prevalent in the previous century” (Schwartz & Ehrenberg, 133). De L’Isle’s maps, for example, were the first to show California as a “Peninsula” rather than an Island (Tooley, 19). Comparisons made between De L’Isle’s 1718 map of Louisiana and the Mississippi River and Herman Moll’s 1715 map of the “Dominions of the King of Great Britain” triggered intense disputes between France and England over territorial boundaries, particularly the Carolinas. This fine map of the western North American continent is printed from a re-engraved plate of De L’Isle’s “L’Amerique Septentrionale” by Georg Lotter, with Latin place names and captions, published in Augsburg by Tobias Lotter, one-time chief engraver and son-in-law of Matthias Seutter, whose mapmaking business Lotter and his sons Georg and Niathias continued after 1757 (Moreland & Bannister). See Tooley 34 and 69 (plates 9 and 14). Shipping will be a consideration due to size and weight. Simply a stunningly attractive, handsome map that is superb in its presentation and ready to hang upon display.