Frederik de Wit
Encyclopedia
- Frederick de Wit (1629/30, GoudaGoudaGouda is a city and municipality in the western Netherlands, in the province of South Holland. Gouda, which was granted city rights in 1272, is famous for its Gouda cheese, smoking pipes, and 15th-century city hall....
- 1706, AmsterdamAmsterdamAmsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
), the company founder
Frederick de Wit (1629/30 - 1706), the company founder
Frederick de Wit was born Frederick Hendricksz or Frederick son of Hendrick. He was born to a Protestant family in 1629/30, in Gouda, a small city in the province of Holland, one of the seven united provinces of the Netherlands. His father Hendrick Fredericsz (1608 - 29 July1668) was a hechtmaecker (knife handle maker) from Amsterdam, and his mother Neeltij Joosten († before 1658) was the daughter of a merchant in Gouda. Frederick was married on the 29th of August 1661, to Maria van der Way (1632–1711), the daughter of a wealthy Catholic merchant in Amsterdam. From ca. 1648 until his death at the end of July 1706, Frederick de Wit lived and worked in Amsterdam. Frederick and Maria had seven children, but only one Franciscus Xaverius (1666-1727) survived them.By 1648, during the height of the Dutch Golden Age
Dutch Golden Age
The Golden Age was a period in Dutch history, roughly spanning the 17th century, in which Dutch trade, science, military and art were among the most acclaimed in the world. The first half is characterised by the Eighty Years' War till 1648...
, De Wit had moved from Gouda to Amsterdam. As early as 1654 he had opened a printing office and shop under the name “De Drie Crabben” (the Three Crabs) which was also the name of his house on the Kalverstraat
Kalverstraat
The Kalverstraat is the busiest shopping street of Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. It is named after the kalvermarkt that was held here until the 17th Century....
. In 1655, De Wit changed the name of his shop to the “Witte Pascaert” (the White Chart). Under this name De Wit and his firm became internationally known.
De Wit's cartographic work
The first cartographic images that De Wit engraved were a plan of Haarlem that has been dated to 1648, and sometime before 1649 De Wit engraved the city views - city mapCity map
A city map is a large-scale thematic map of a city created to enable the fastest possible orientation in an urban space. The graphic representation of objects on a city map is therefore usually greatly simplified, and reduced to generally understood symbology.Depending upon its target group or...
s for the cities of Rijsel
Lille
Lille is a city in northern France . It is the principal city of the Lille Métropole, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country behind those of Paris, Lyon and Marseille. Lille is situated on the Deûle River, near France's border with Belgium...
and Doornik
Tournai
Tournai is a Walloon city and municipality of Belgium located 85 kilometres southwest of Brussels, on the river Scheldt, in the province of Hainaut....
that appeared in the richly illustrated Flandria Illustrata by the Flemish
Flanders
Flanders is the community of the Flemings but also one of the institutions in Belgium, and a geographical region located in parts of present-day Belgium, France and the Netherlands. "Flanders" can also refer to the northern part of Belgium that contains Brussels, Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp...
historian, Antonius Sanderus.
The first charts engraved by De Wit were published in 1654 under the “De Drie Crabben” address. The first map that was both engraved and dated by De Wit was that of Denmark
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
"REGNI DANIÆ Accuratissima delineatio Perfeckte Kaerte van ‘t CONJNCKRYCK DENEMARCKEN." in 1659. His first world maps, "NOVA TOTIUS TERRARUM ORBIS TABULA AUCTORE F. DE WIT."(approx. 43 x 55 cm) and Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula (a wall map approx. 140 x 190 cm) appeared around 1660.
His atlases (Atlas and Atlas Maior) began to appear around 1662 and included anywhere from 17 to 190 maps each. In ca.1675 De Wit released a new nautical atlas. His atlas of the Low Countries
Low Countries
The Low Countries are the historical lands around the low-lying delta of the Rhine, Scheldt, and Meuse rivers, including the modern countries of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and parts of northern France and western Germany....
first published in 1667, was named Nieuw Kaertboeck van de XVII Nederlandse Provinciën and contained 14 to 25 maps. De Wit's city map books first started appearing in 1695. De Wit quickly expanded upon his first small folio atlas which contained mostly maps printed from plates that he had acquired, to an atlas with 27 maps engraved by or for him. By 1671 he was publishing a large folio atlas with as many as 100 maps. Smaller atlases of 17 or 27 or 51 maps could still be purchased and by the mid 1670s an atlas of as many as 151 maps could be purchased from his shop. His atlases cost between 7 and 20 Guilders depending on the number of maps, color and the quality of binding (€47 or $70 to €160 or $240 today). De Wit published no fewer than 158 land maps and 43 charts on separate folio sheets.
Dating De Wit's atlases and city map books is difficult because usually no dates were recorded on the maps and their dates of publication extended over many years.
De Wit's social standing in Amsterdam
Through his marriage to Maria van der Way in 1661, he obtained in 1662, the rights of Amsterdam citizenship and was able to become a member of the Guild of Saint LukeGuild of Saint Luke
The Guild of Saint Luke was the most common name for a city guild for painters and other artists in early modern Europe, especially in the Low Countries. They were named in honor of the Evangelist Luke, the patron saint of artists, who was identified by John of Damascus as having painted the...
in 1664. In 1689 De Wit requested and received a fifteen year privilege from the States Holland and West-Friesland, that protected his right to publish and sell his maps.Then in 1694, he was named a good citizen of the city of Amsterdam.
Maria's stewardship of the firm 1706-1710
After Frederick de Wit's death in 1706 his wife Maria continued the business for four years printing and editing De Wit's maps until 1710. However as De Wit’s son Franciscus was already a prosperous stockfish merchant by this time and had little interest in his father's business he did not takeover the publishing house. In 1610 Maria sold the firm of at auction.De Wit's Legacy
At the auction most of the atlas plates and some of the wall map were sold to Pieter Mortier (1661–1711), a geographer, copper engraver, printer and publisher from Amsterdam. After Mortier’s death, his firm eventually passed to the ownership of his son, Cornelis Mortier and Johannes Covens I who together founded Covens & Mortier on November 20, 1721. Covens & Mortier grew to become one of the largest cartography publishing houses of the 18th century.The 27 chart plates from his 1675 Sea atlas were sold at the 1610 auction, to the Amsterdam print seller Luis Renard, who published them under his own name in 1715, and then sold them to Rennier and Joshua Ottens who continued to publish them until the mid 1700's.
External links
- Maps of 18th century Livoniæ - National Library of Estonia (Digital Collection)
- Map of America (approx 1670) - David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
Maps
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