https://www.islandimagined.ca/meachams_atlas The Prince Edward Island atlas is embellished with 163 lithographed views of various Island buildings, farmsteads, commercial establishments, churches, and broad rural landscape. Among those topographical categories are works of art, at a minuscule scale, that display extraordinary skill in presenting very ordinary rural scenes with compositional genius. The Artists At present, we know virtually nothing about the artists Meacham employed in his various projects. Looking closely at the 163 views in the atlas it is easy to see different hands in the composition of the pictures, some just adequate and others very skilled. Throughout the writing of these posts on Meacham’s atlas I only came across the name…

The first great atlas Atlases have been a vital tool of the civilised world since the Sixteenth Century when in 1570 Abraham Ortelius, a Flemish cartographer and geographer published a huge book of woodcut maps called Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, or Theater of the World. Courtesy of Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc. It was at a time when in Europe the word theatre had an extraordinarily wide and varied meaning from the anatomical theatres in places like Padua where the human body was explored in detail for the first time and published, with great engravings that looked like maps  by the Dutchman Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) The human spirit was not…