Turgot Plan of Paris, 1739

The story of this map

In 1734 Michel-Étienne Turgot, the head of the Paris municipality, commissioned a plan of the city unlike any before it. Louis Bretez, a draughtsman and teacher of perspective, spent years walking the streets with a licence to enter any courtyard and garden, and the result was engraved by Claude Lucas and published in 1739 across twenty sheets.

What makes the Turgot plan so loved is that it is not really a map at all but a portrait. Every building is drawn in bird’s-eye perspective, so you can pick out Notre-Dame on its island, the long galleries of the Louvre, the formal parterres of the Tuileries, the bridges lined with houses, and the crooked medieval lanes of the Marais. It is Paris before Haussmann’s boulevards, dense and tangled and endlessly explorable.

Our print assembles the sheets into a single continuous view, so the city reads as one. It is the sort of picture people stand in front of with a finger out, tracing a walk they once took along the Seine or hunting for the street where they stayed.

It belongs to our Antique Maps of Europe collection and makes a natural pair with the Rocque plan of London of a few years later, the two great cities of the eighteenth century side by side. Hang it wide over a sofa or a bed, where its detail can be enjoyed at leisure. 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: assemble the composite from the archive's 20 separately scanned sheets, matching tone and alignment at the joins; crop scan margins, balance colour cast and levels while keeping the paper tone, 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.