Loire-Atlantique

The French département of Loire-Atlantique (formerly Loire-Inférieure) is located in the Pays-de-la-Loire region in the north west of the country, with Nantes as its principal city.

The motley collection of images below was obtained from the Prints & Engravings section of the Digital Archives of Loire-Atlantique. That's not to say that all the items seen here are specifically from or about this particular département. Rather, that's just where they've ended up, although the vast majority that I saw are either from Pays-de-la-Loire or adjoining regions.





The story goes that a man named Coatanlen from Île-de-Bréhat, an island off the coast of Brittany, was in Lisbon in 1484 and met Christopher Columbus. Coatanlen told the explorer of the existence of the New World and how he and his fellow Bréhat fishermen sailed across the Atlantic to Newfoundland in search of their catch. So the Bréhatians would have it believed that they discovered America before Columbus. Or something along those lines.

The print above - with text in the Breton language - celebrates the Coatanlen legend and is a reproduction of a poster seen in Nantes shops during 1958 Brittany week. (Thanks JK)

Hand-coloured, engraved map of the city of Nantes (~late 17th c. or so)

WWII caricature of Churchill and Roosevelt fighting over Africa by artist Jean Fort and published in 1941 by Bedos & Co of Paris at the behest of ORAFF*, the German propaganda unit in occupied France.





The Chêne Chapelle or Chapel Oak of Allouville-Bellefosse in the northern French region of Haute-Normandie is the most famous tree in France. Since 1669 the ~1000 year old tree has housed two tiny religious chapels (Notre Dame de la Paix [Our Lady of Peace] and Chambre de l'Ermite [the Hermit's room] in its hollow trunk, together with an outside spiral access staircase.

See: Wikimedia | Flickr & the blog Krapo Arboricole - en Français - whose purview includes the venerable trees of France.

This lithographed plate of Chêne Chapelle appeared in 'La Normandie Illustrée' by Felix Benoist, published in Nantes in the mid-1850s by Charpentier Père [more plates].

Eat some fish!

This 1995 poster was drawn by P Péron and published by Imprimerie Cloître in Brest. Presumably it was a primary industry business drive.

A stylised 1980 heritage poster for an astronomical observatory.
[I'm fairly sure that I've posted this image here a loooong time ago]

Designed and engraved by François-Hippolyte Lalaisse and first published in Nantes in 1848 by Charpentier Père, this man from Châteauneuf-du-Faou (a commune in the département of Finistère) is from a work on Brittany costumes and scenic engravings: 'Galerie Armoricaine'.

Not even St Nicholas can resist the lure of advertising for the national lottery
(undated, printed in Paris)

Public health poster from 1922 for the Pasteur Institute,
trying to raise money for vaccine research on Pasteur Day.

Another mid-1850s print from Charpentier Père in Nantes; this time an advertisement for the Golden Lion Hotel in the Britanny town of Redon in the Ille-et-Vilaine département . If the building survives today, it has likely changed names if not business type.

From a different edition of 'La Normandie Illustrée'
(a few images up), this lithograph shows a group of ladies
from Normandy wearing local garb in a row-boat.

A Postal Museum flyer designed by Roderick Laing from Nantes.
It's undated but there are a couple of search
results from the 1970s referencing Laing.

Table of municipal armorial crests for the communes of Loire-Atlantique. The representative symbols date back to the Crusades. I think the motifs chosen are intended as examples of the development of the crests over the centuries. There are less than 100 coats of arms depicted but there are over 200 communes in Loire-Atlantique today (this may have something to do with Loire-Atlantique originally being incorporated as part of Brittany... or it may not).

[click through for enlarged versions; those images with black borders were spliced together
from screencaps; some images have been background cleaned to varying extents]

• The main digital collection of Loire-Atlantique.
• The posters and engravings section -- you can search by location, keyword thesaurus (try 'géographie' for example) or designer/artist name, but there's no way (that I could see) to simply browse. There's also a distinct lack of background detail.