New acquisition: Chatelain's Atlas historique, the Asia volume, 1719
We have added to our stock the fifth volume of Henri Abraham Chatelain's Atlas historique, the volume devoted to Asia, in its first edition, printed at Amsterdam by L'Honoré & Châtelain in 1719 and opening with an allegorical frontispiece by Bernard Picart.
The Atlas historique was the great encyclopaedic atlas of the early eighteenth century: maps after Guillaume Delisle surrounded by genealogies, chronologies, costumes, ceremonies and views, with commentaries by Nicolas Gueudeville. The Asia volume is the most sought after of the seven, with the map of Japan 'drawn from the maps of the Japanese' and its inset of Nagasaki, the reception of the Dutch ambassadors in Japan, the view of Miyako, the royal barges and elephants of Siam, the porcelain pagoda of Fukien, the genealogical tree of the twenty-two dynasties of China and the large folding map of Java with the port of Batavia and the Dutch forts of the Indies.
Our copy is complete with all its plates, in a nineteenth-century binding of half red morocco. It sits naturally beside the Nieuhof of 1665 announced earlier this week: Chatelain's plates of China and Japan are the summing-up, for the general reader of 1719, of what Nieuhof and the Jesuit fathers had reported half a century before.