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OVERTON, Philip - BOWLES, Thomas : The Counties of Essex Middlesex & Hertfordshire. Actualy Survey’d by Several Hands Corrected and Amended & Humbly Dedicated to the Nobility and Gentry of the Said Counties

590 x 925 mm., early outline colour, with secondary folds as issued to facilitate binding, some to lower right fold repair work and at the double folds, light brown to right fold otherwise in good condition.

In 1715 Philip Overton published a rare two-sheet map of Oxfordshire. No other county followed until 1726 when in partnership with Thomas Bowles he published a reduction of the John Warburton, Joseph Bland and Payler Smyth survey of Middlesex and the neighbouring home counties of Essex and Hertfordshire undertaken 1721 to 1724. This had been published in the previous year 1725. It supplied a burgeoning market for more accurate maps than those of Christopher Saxton, John Norden, William Smith or John Speed which were now over a century old. Although the plate was extant until at least 1795 when it appeared in the catalogue of Bowles and Carver the fact that it was separately published accounts for the poor survival. It is mainly those examples preserved in composite atlases over the years which have survived. Despite covering three counties its size enables a good level of detail at half an inch to the mile. Upper left the map is adorned with a town plan of St. Alban’s and upper right is a fine ‘North Prospect of Colchester’. Provenance: private English collection since the 1970s. Hodson (1974) p. 227; Hodson (1984-97) I pp. 166-8; Rodger (1972) 118; Tooley Essex in ‘The Map Collector’ no. 36 p. 36 E22.

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