Introducing The Sunderland Collection Original Prints

As custodians of one of the finest historic map collections in the world, The Sunderland Collection is keen to share its passion for cartography as widely as possible.

Access is very much at the heart of the collection, and through this digital platform we’re now able to bring the delights of ancient cartography direct to the homes of map enthusiasts and scholars across the world.

But we also want to honour the tactile traditions of craft and fine printing long associated with maps, which, hundreds of years ago, first allowed these early projections of the world to be disseminated in atlases and books. It’s for this reason that we’ve launched The Sunderland Collection original prints – a series of archival quality prints in strictly limited editions.

The original prints were born out of a chance encounter between Oculi Mundi founder Helen Sunderland-Cohen and master printmaker and co-founder of Plaintiff Press, Kristina Chan at a photography fair in London. Falling into conversation, the pair soon discovered their shared passion for traditional print techniques and particularly intaglio printing – one of the earliest forms of printmaking later favoured by artists including Rembrandt, Goya and Picasso.

At the outset of their collaboration, Sunderland-Cohen and Chan launched into an extensive testing of print processes, papers and inks with the goal of achieving the perfect aesthetic balance between the original brightness of the maps and how they appear today, having gracefully aged over centuries. For our colour editions we developed a special hand colour washing process employing delicate translucent watercolour that allows the print detail to shine through, celebrating lines lost under pigment in the original works. The result is an archival series that closely echoes the fine qualities of a time-aged atlas.

Above: Kristina Chan, Plaintiff Press

Honouring traditional printmaking processes as much as the maps themselves, editions are hand printed on traditional presses using the intaglio method. Our carefully chosen papers are artisanal and our ink tones are meticulously matched to the original artworks – with many editions having the option of hand-coloured as well as black and white prints.

Each Sunderland Collection original print is individually numbered and embossed and comes with extra generous margins to maximise framing options.

The first print in our series is an exquisite world map projection from Francesco Berlinghieri’s Geographia of 1482. To find out more click here.

Berlinghieri World Map, black and white

Edition of 200

50 x 70cm archival intaglio print on Fabriano Unica 290 gsm

£350

Available for purchase here

Berlinghieri World Map, hand-coloured

Edition of 20

50 x 70cm hand-coloured archival intaglio print on Fabriano Tieopolo 290 gsm

£3,200

Available for purchase here