Very scarce third Paris edition of this important and influential French atlas.
From 1670 to 1689 Alexis-Hubert Jaillot (ca. 1632-1712) worked in partnership with the heirs of Nicolas Sanson, Guillaume and Adrien; they had fallen out with their father’s publisher, Pierre Mariette jr., but did not have the capital to finance production of the maps themselves. The arrangement was for the Sansons, most probably Guillaume, to draught a series of two-sheet maps, which Jaillot would have engraved, and publish. These maps were to form the basis of the Atlas Nouveau, which was first assembled as an atlas in 1681.
The Atlas Nouveau was the first French volume to call itself an atlas; here, however, ‘Atlas’ refers to the Titan Atlas, who was condemned to bear the weight of the sky on his shoulders. He is depicted in the plinth above the title, labelled ‘Hercules Francois’. To his left is an equestrian portrait of Louis XIV and to the right one of the Dauphin. Although ostensibly a world atlas, apart from the general maps of the continents, the only maps of particular regions outside Europe are the maps of the Turkish Empire and of the Holy Land.
Jaillot customarily re-dated his maps as he went along, which means dates can vary even in a single edition. In this copy several maps have different dates to those recorded in Pastoureau’s collation of a 1689 edition; here the maps of North America and the Alps are dated 1690.
The atlas is complicated by the variant dates found on the maps; this copy contains the same set of maps as described in Pastoureau, but it is an earlier assemblage, with several of the maps retaining earlier dates (World 1684; Europe 1684 as two examples; with some earlier than noted by Pastoureau) but North America and the Alps are dated 1690, the resumed date of assembly of this volume.
The atlas was also very influential, partly because of Sanson’s reputation, but the impressive elephant-folio format of the maps inspired later publishers to produce atlases on the same format. Apart from the Dutch contrefaçon, atlases composed of two sheet-maps were issued William Berry, Herman Moll, Charles Price and Jeremiah Seller, John Senex, George Willdey and Henry Overton in London, and by Johann Hoffman in Nuremberg.
The French original is the progenitor of these various versions, and thus the more important, but also of greater scarcity.
Reference: cf. Pastoureau, Jaillot 1 C: a late issue of this edition with maps dated to 1693.
