Irlande Royaume divisé en ses quatre Provinces..

SANSON'S MAP OF IRELAND IN ITS THIRD AND RAREST STATE BY GILLES ROBERT.
Sanson's 1665 map of Ireland, in it THIRD AND RAREST STATE, with the 1741 imprint of Gilles Robert. At a scale of about 1:1,700,000 it covers the whole of Ireland and parts of the coasts of England, Wales and Scotland. In Ireland, the provincial and county boundaries are marked, along with the cities, towns and geographical features.
Title and imprint in a cartouche at upper left, decorated with 2 robed figures and foliage; 4 scales at lower left; and latitude and longitude indications in the borders.
The map, originally engraved for the elder Nicolas Sanson to be sold by Pierre Mariette and dated 1665, announced a privilege for twenty years and appeared in Sanson's Cartes generales de toutes les parties du monde from 1665 on. Sanson's great-grandson Gilles Robert (1688-1766) acquired some Sanson materials from his uncle Pierre Moullart-Sanson in 1730, and also took over the title géographe du roi. He reprinted many maps from Sanson's seventeenth-century plates, some revised and some not.
We have not had the opportunity to compare the geographical content with the map in the first or second states, but it seems likely that it still reflects the situation in 1665 (Law notes no changes except the imprint). It is not known to have been issued in an atlas.
Robert's earliest atlases were of a smaller format, and by the time he began issuing larger format atlases after 1750 he had replaced or extensively revised the Sanson maps, accounting for the rarity of Robert's Sanson reprints.
The paper of the present copy is watermarked "P|[double heart]|GOVRBEYRE MOYEN|AUVERGNE 1742" = chaplet, and the map was formerly bound with others dating from c. 1742-1745, including other late printings of seventeenth-century Sanson maps and maps by Gilles Robert also on P. Gourbeyre paper.
A very good copy of Robert's reprint of Sanson's map of Ireland.
Reference: Law, Printed Maps of Ireland 11 (iii); for the 1665 state, see BMC Printed Maps XII, col. 865; Nordenskiöld 275, vol. 2, map 13; Pastoureau, Sanson V B (and later editions), map 122.