EXTREMELY RARE MAP OF FRANCE, BY ISAAK VERBIEST.

The title appears in a cartouche at the upper right. This cartouche is decorated at the top by a crowned shield with the French coat of arms flanked by seated figures of Justice and Minerva and at the bottom by twelve coats of arms: Les Pères de France. The map is framed on four sides by decorative borders. In the upper left and right corners are portraits of King Louis XIII and Queen Anne. Along the upper edge of the map, the image runs a row of seven towns in oval frames: Poictiers - Bourges - Marseille - Paris - Lion - Orleans - Angiers. In the centre of the decorative bottom border of the map is a long oval cartouche with a legend concerning the eight seats of the houses of parliaments, the twelve representatives of the Empire's class structure in Paris, and the seventeen residences of the archbishops. This cartouche (with some 17th-century handwriting) is flanked on each side by three town views: Tours - Beaumont - Rochelle and Bordeaus - Roan - Cales. These views (except Rochelle) were copied from a Hondius map. Costumed figures of the different social classes frame the side borders of the map. Schilder quotes three copies of this first edition: one in Paris, Bibl. Nat., but without borders; one in an atlas on a Sotheby's sale (1982), but with the town views cut off and mounted separately at the end, and one in a private collection. There is also a second state with the date 1636 (2 recorded copies) and a third state with the date 1653 (1 recorded copy).

Pieter Verbiest (Petrus Verbist) and Isaak Verbiest (Isack Verbist)

Pieter Verbiest (Antwerpen, 1607-1674) was an Antwerp cartographer and engraver. Little is known about his life.
One of his most important works is the Novus Tabularum Geographicorum Belgicae (Antwerp, 1636), a pocket atlas of which two more editions were published later (1644 and 1652). Isaak Verbiest, probably a brother of Pieter, drew and engraved certain maps. Their collaboration also led to the production of two rare world maps.

Pieter Verbiest also published folio maps as separate publications. Koeman describes three editions of a Verbiest atlas of the Netherlands, published between 1636 and 1652. Only one copy of each of these atlases is known.
Verbiest-maps, some with beautiful decorative borders with city views, costumed figures and coats of arms, were sometimes bound in composite atlases. Occasionally, copies of these scarce maps come onto the market.