[De Wit, Frederick] and Ottens, R & J

Large engraved wall map in 6 sheets joined, flanked by engraved borders (map area 1250 x 1020 mm; 1346 x 1689 with borders) side-borders comprising ten city views, each approx 130 x 190mm (Left border: Mexico, Mauritiopolis, Mauritiopolis/Reciffa, Nieuw Amsterdam, Nombre de Dios, La Verra Crus, Trugillo, Havana portus, Callao de Lima, and Cartagena. Right border: S Salvador, Buones Aires, Caput S. Augustini, Boa Vista, Panama, S. Marta, Campetie, S. Domingo, Portus Acapulco, and Porto Rico), top border with main running title (printed from separate engraved plates) designed in the form of a banner held to view by a rooster and hen, with a central putto standing on a terrestrial sphere, a celestial orb on his shoulders with Helios, Selene, and 5 other smaller gods in the background; flanked on the left by a variety of New World scenes, plants, and beasts including a turkey and variety of other fowl, a chamelon, a deer hunting scene, livestock and beasts of burden, a church, as well as a Conquistador and a Native American in conversation and on the right by Old World scenes, plants, and beasts, including a lion, elephant, and bear, a pyramid, as well as an Ottoman Turk in conversation with an African; lower border with text in French, beginning "Nouvelle description de l'Amerique..." Map showing North and South America as well as Western edge of Europe, circular inset map of the North Pole, California as an island, secondary title "AMERICA" at lower left. The whole re-mounted on linen, hand-colored and with some overpainting, abrasions, margins restored with some loss of printed text and engraved surface at extremities and elsewhere. Glazed and framed to 1448 x 1784 mm. Unexamined out of frame.

Acquired from Graham Arader

see Burden II, 428; see Shirley 453

Very rare, large engraved wall map of America, Burden's state 3 of De Wit's America, originally issued in Amsterdam in 1672, and here done by the brothers Reiner and Joachim Ottens ca 1730, with the five 'enclosed' great Lakes, Australia with a faint southern coastline, and the routes of explorers added to the oceans. Burden, in The Mapping of North America, lists only two known examples, and notes that "the same decorative title and twenty city views appeared in the Sotheby's example (lot 291 London, 21-22 May 1984) of state 2. This is a possible indication of the Ottens firm issuing the map in its second state also."