To celebrate Stick No BillsⓇ new Europe Flagship Gallery in the heart of Barcelona’s Art Route, a mere 200m from the Museo Picasso and the MOCO art museum and located in the heart of El Born’s Art Route, we are adding to our collection of licensed, authorised poster artworks and fine art prints a new example of vintage cartography.
Plano Monumental de Barcelona, c. 1917 is a fully authorised, vintage poster artwork originally commissioned by the Sociedad de Atracción de Forasteros, featuring a fascinating exploration of the newer, contemporaneous town planning around the ancient, mediaeval city, highlighting the architecturally significant buildings that would confirm Barcelona’s iconic status as a city of exceptional beauty and style in the run up to the Expo of 1929.
Spanish speakers will be chuckling at the name of the organisation created to bring foreigners to the area, as foraster0 is, quite literally, an old-fashioned and ever-so-slightly derogatory term for an outsider.
Eagled-eyed architectural history aficionados will note how the map doesn’t yet include upmarket neighbourhoods such as the Eixample, planned in the 1850s by renowned architect Ildefons Cerdà and then gradually developed throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Since the founding of Stick No BillsⓇ in 2011, Meg and her husband, the late Phil Baber, developed a fascination with antique maps and the stories they tell. Either as stand-alone pieces to catch the eye in any interior setting, or grouped together as a collection of antique cartography, maps have the power to go beyond a place’s geography and reveal a whole world of possibility to set the imagination alight.
Our latest addition to our Historical Maps collection joins a growing family of carefully curated lithographs and prints from the places with which we have developed a close relationship over the years; Sri Lanka, South Asia and Mallorca. Adding Barcelona to this list with such a magnificent example of a historical map shows how we continue to explore our relationship with the cities where we are based; a forensic deep dive into archives and collections to uncover gems at risk of being lost forever. Our careful, pixel-by-pixel remastering and then printing technologies and new-generation paper means we are now proud the ensure these historical gems will last for generations into the future.
