Moll World Map, 1719

The story of this map

Herman Moll came to London from the Continent in the late 1600s and became the busiest map engraver in the city, the man whose sheets hung in coffee houses and counting rooms as Britain’s trade spread across the oceans. This is his large two-hemisphere world map of 1719, “A New & Correct Map of the Whole World”, and the Library of Congress copy is coloured by hand.

Where the Dutch maps of the previous century leaned on allegory, Moll leaned on information. The hemispheres are surrounded by dense panels of engraved text, notes on winds, seas and discoveries, so the map reads as much as it decorates. His famous stubbornness is on show too: California is drawn as an island, a view he defended long after others had abandoned it. The hand colouring picks out the continents in soft period washes.

At 24 x 36 inches this is a genuine wall map, the sort of thing that carries a study, a boardroom or the long wall of a hall on its own. At 12 x 18 it becomes a handsome, readable print for above a desk.

It belongs to our Antique World Maps collection and pairs naturally with Moll’s own map of the West Indies from a few years earlier. Each print is made to order on archival matte paper and framed in the country of delivery.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Restoration plan: crop scan margins, balance colour cast and levels while keeping the paper tone and hand colour, remove library stamps and scanner artefacts if present, gentle sharpening. No repainting of original content.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.