Henri Sengre

Henri Sengre (* around 1632 probably in Worms , † around 1712 probably in France ) was a French military cartographer who created topographic maps of the Rhine regions for France's service.

His work fell in the time of the Reunion Wars (1667–1697), through whose demands the already high-quality French military cartography took another big boom, in which he also played a part. At that time domestic and foreign cartographers took its representation in the style of the great theater of war (Theatrum belli) as a model for their own work.

Originally, Henri Sengre seems to have been German and to come from Worms. This can be deduced from his good spelling of the German topographical names, which French cartographers have always had difficulties with, and also from the changing signatures on his maps with Sengher, Senghre or Sengre. There is another very good proof of Henri Sengres relationship to Worms: In the text of a map ( Nouvelle Carte tres utile pour les Gens de Guerre ) by the French geographer Jean Baptiste Liébaux (1673–1744) from 1724 he is named Henri Sangher de Named Worms .

Fields of activity

Upper Rhine war theater : The large overview map of the Upper Rhine area by Henri Sengre in the version from 1692

From 1667, for example, Henri Sengre created cartographies of the Rhine regions in the service of the Duc de Bourbon , the Great Condé. To do this, he used older templates from the French military archives as well as his own mappings, which he carried out himself in the areas to be included, often in the entourage of French military leaders such as Marshal Turenne . In the course of time, a number of map series were created, one of which stands out in particular: the large overview map of the Upper Rhine region, which is composed of eight sheets and is known as the Upper Rhine War Theater . The map measures approximately 158 × 85 cm and is better (like all other maps by Sengre) in terms of labeling and topographical representation than its predecessor. It was published in 1692 by the French cartographer and publisher Alexis Hubert Jaillot (1632-1712) in Paris ; there have probably been much earlier publications, but all of them are probably lost. (This war theater map of Sengre was more or less copied afterwards by many other cartographers for their own work, most definitely by Guillaume Delisle (1675–1726) for his Rhine map Cours du Rhin depuis Bale jusqu'a Bonne from 1704. ) Further maps of the Upper Rhine area by Henri Sengre are still documented: a map of Alsace in four sheets, a Breisgau and Black Forest map that have been lost, a map of the battle of Sinsheim , a map of the area around Strasbourg, an overview map of western Germany in three sheets and a map of the area between Baden-Baden and Frankfurt in two sheets.

literature

• Fritz Hellwig, Wolfgang Reiniger, Klaus Stopp: Maps of the Palatinate on the Rhine 1513–1803: Catalog of the printed maps with an introduction to map history , Druck Förner GmbH, Bad Kreuznach 1984, ISBN 3-923714-01-7
• Ruthardt Oehme: The history of the cartography of the German southwest: With 16 color plates and 42 black and white maps , Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Konstanz and Stuttgart 1961
• Franz Grenacher: The beginnings of military cartography on the Upper Rhine , in: Basler Zeitschrift , 56 (1957), pp. 67–118, and 57 (1958), pp. 89–131

Web links

• Literature by and about Henri Sengre in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Remarks

1. ↑ Grenacher suspects that the original German name was singer.
2. ↑ The name of the cartographer Johann Christoph Hurter is also mentioned in the text.
3. ↑ More imitator included the German Militärkartograph Cyriaksburg Blödner (1672-1733) in his work Theatrum Belli Rhenani and the French cartographer and publisher de Fer Nicolas (1646-1720) in his atlas Le Theater de la Guerre dessus et aux environs du Rhein from the year 1705.
4. ↑ Oehme: The history of the cartography of the German Southwest (1961), p. 111