1702 / 1710 Homann Map of the Netherlands, Southeast Asia, and New York

A beautiful, original color example of Johann Baptist Homann's 1702 map of the Netherlands, featuring inset maps and city views celebrating the 17th-century global empire of the Dutch. It is the only Homann map to name New York City.

A Closer Look

The central map focuses on the Netherlands, inclusive of part of Germany in the east, and Flanders and the Duchy of Brabant in the south. (The Duchy of Brabant was at that time part of the Netherlands as the territory of Staats-Brabant, although not one of the founding provinces of the Dutch Republic.) An inset map in the lower right includes the course of the River Meuse upstream of Wessem, including Maastricht and part of Limburg.

Neighboring the elegant, allegorical cartouche are two inset maps portraying two of the Dutch trading empire's global footholds. Below the cartouche is a map of Southeast Asia, including part of Australia (Nova Hollandia) shown as it was understood prior to the explorations of Abel Tasman (1603 - 1659). At the bottom of the inset is a view of the Dutch port of Batavia, on Java.

At the upper right of the cartouche is an inset map of New York and New England, in the northeast part of North America. Derived from the Jansson-Visscher map's c. 1683 cartography, it focuses on the Dutch-settled New Netherlands and includes a rendition of the so-called 'Visscher View' of New Amsterdam. The passage of the territory into the hands of the English is quietly acknowledged with the inclusion of the place name 'Niew Jorck'

A Beautifully Engraved Cartouche

The expert engraver at work in producing this plate employed classical figures in celebration of the Dutch trading empire, even as it was in decline. A winged avatar of fame blows her trumpet atop the composition, bestowing a laurel of victory to the Netherlands; a cluster of putti flutter up to her, muscling the Dutch royal arms into place along with a caduceus invoking the Dutch's mercantile power. Suspending the cartouche are a merman and nereid, while another cradles a ship in her arms; meanwhile, Neptune points magisterially at the name of the Dutch Republic: all acknowledgments of the Dutch achievements as a sea power.

Publication History and Census

This is the first plate of this map, probably engraved by Homann himself, for inclusion in his planned 1702 Neuer Atlas. This first plate remained in the Homann atlas until 1716 at the latest, by which point a completely re-engraved second plate began to appear. It is easily distinguishable by the very different engraving of the cartouche, with additional long hachure added to the Batavia view and different shading schemes for the figures; also, the engraver of the second plate did not exhibit as much skill at rendering faces as the engraver of the first plate. There are many other changes in the execution of decorative detail but not in content, but we observe no changes in the geography. A third plate appears in the vicinity of 1730, which included the imperial privilege. We see this third plate appearing unchanged as late as 1788 in the Homann Heirs atlases. The present first-plate example is from a 1710 edition of the Neuer Atlas. In its various editions, the map is well-represented in institutional collections, and versions of the map occasionally appear on the market. However, there is no complete census of individual states and plates, so the dating of these pieces is difficult to determine without examination of the maps themselves.