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Description

Striking example of De Wit's rare fire plan of London.

Interesting broadsheet map of London, published in the same year as the Great Fire and showing the extent of the damage caused. The map covers London fromBunhill to St. George's Southwark, and from St. James's to Redriff, with a description below of the Great Fire in Dutch and French and an inset view of London in Flames. There are at least 3 states of the map, with the other editions not including the decorative cherubs in the upper left and right corners, the vignette to the left of the fire inset, and the extension of the roads and fields beyond the City plan proper.

The present example of the map is state 3. The 3 states can be identified as follows (courtesy of Ashley Baynton-Williams): State 1: has '... De Aenwysinghe ...' in the title and no inset of the fire; State 2: has the inset of the fire; State 3: has '... Nieuw Model ...' in the title. with additions to the outskirts of the map, field boundaries, paths etc., names added, cherubs, panels, city arms, and other decorative features.

Frederick De Wit Biography

De Wit (1629 ca.-1706) was a mapmaker and mapseller who was born in Gouda but who worked and died in Amsterdam. He moved to the city in 1648, where he opened a printing operation under the name of The Three Crabs; later, he changed the name of his shop to The White Chart. From the 1660s onward, he published atlases with a variety of maps; he is best known for these atlases and his Dutch town maps. After Frederik’s death in 1706, his wife Maria ran the shop for four years before selling it. Their son, Franciscus, was a stockfish merchant and had no interest in the map shop. At the auction to liquidate the de Wit stock, most of the plates went to Pieter Mortier, whose firm eventually became Covens & Mortier, one of the biggest cartography houses of the eighteenth century.