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Description

Finely engraved map of Rotterdam, published by Frederick De Wit in Amsterdam.

The map appeared in his town book of the Low Countries.

De Wit's map of Rotterdam is very similar to the map from Joan Blaeu's Town Book from 1649. After the fire that destroyed Blaeu in 1672, Frederick de Wit had part of the copper plates from Blaeu's estate and issued it under its own name. Blaeu had his plan of the city made with the cityscape of around 1645 and gives the topography in detail and also reliably basically. De Wit supplements the map image with the ports and yards along the Maas and extends the legend.

In the second half of the 17th century, Rotterdam was at the height of its prime.  

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.