Description

A detailed map of Australia, printed on 9 sheets and originally mounted on linen, showcases the latest discoveries, settlements, rivers, mountains, telegraph and road connections.

As this map was usually issued in Adolf Stieler’s Handatlas, examples were also sold separately to people, who had a specific interest in Australia (or other parts of the world), but did not want to purchase the entire atlas.

Our example has been contemporary mounted on linen and ornated with green silk edging.

August Petermann (1822-78) was one of the leading cartographers in the world during his era. He studied under the great Heinrich Berghaus and from 1845 to 1854 he gained invaluable experience working in London and Edinburgh. He then returned to Germany, assuming a leading role at the Perthes Geographic Institute in Gotha, which founded in 1772, was the most prestigious commercial cartographic house in Continental Europe. In 1855, Petermann founded the journal that became Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, considered by many to be the world’s most advanced academic geographic periodical, responsible for debuting great explorers’ discoveries and publishing ground-breaking maps of all areas of the globe. Petermann also drafted a vast corpus of separate maps, as well as contributing to innumerable atlases and books.