The Four Corners Studio

Hampshire based artist specialising in limited watercolour vintage maps depicting routes and landscape England and Wales

Sally and Robb Stone are the artists and photographers behind The Four Corners Studio UK.

Our interests in original maps have developed from an inherent love of travelling and planning journeys to amazing places around the world which started when our children were young and who have now grown-up but still love to travel themselves. 

Our maps are not new by design, in fact they are very old dating back to the 1720s when the English gentleman or lady would use a printed set of pages showing narrow ‘strips’ of roads together with hand sketched landmarks of forests, rivers, hills, churches and notable houses. The original ‘atlas’ was ideal for the 18th century traveller to carry on their journey around England and Wales. The individual maps have intricate detail of observations made at important locations, some in more detail than others and some maps are interestingly characterised by their geographical location. 

Our stock of printed maps originates from Sally’s father Ron Hake, who as a Postal Historian living in Devon, reprinted Emanuel Bowen’s 1731 Britannia Depicta Road Atlas of England and Wales in 1979 as part of his Postal History business.  The books were available in deluxe leather bound or standard cover bound editions, but each book was manually put together from the printed signatures, which we are using today to produce our individually hand-painted maps. 

The maps are painted and mounted (10” x 8” mounts) in our studio workshop based in Hampshire. Printed on vellum paper, Robb recreates and hand-paints using watercolours the individual pages from boxes of stock which have been recovered from Devon. Working as a photographer, Sally has photographed the maps and other images using original items which were part of her father’s business.

What we want is for you too to enjoy the detail of the maps which were created by the original traveller and have a small piece of England or Wales in your home which has a story to tell of wherever you met, you have visited or simply where you live today or wish to live in the future.