1650 Schnitzer View Map of London, England (pre-Fire)

An exceedingly rare c. 1650 view of London, England, of which there are no other known examples. The view looks north from the south side of the Thames River and extends roughly from modern day Waterloo Bridge to modern day Canary Warf, revealing London before the Great Fire of 1666. Important locations are numbered and noted on tables in the upper left and right corners. At the time this view was drawn, old London Bridge, simply identified here as 'Bridge' was the only crossing point on the Thames. Note the houses lining both sides of the bridge which became a problem as the city population grew and the narrow passage between them created a traffic bottle neck. Roughly 100 years after his view was dawn, between 1758 to 1762, all houses and shops on the bridge were demolished through Act of Parliament. Also apparent are the Tower of London (no. 32), the pre-fire St. Paul's Cathedral (no. 1), and presumably Shakespeare's Globe Theater (no. 38, although not numbered on view).

The publication history of this view is something of a mystery as it is of the utmost rarity with no other known examples. It appears to be in the style of similar town views issued by Paulus Fürst and Lucas Schnitzer around 1650. The prints were later reissued by David Funck, who acquired the Fürst/Schnitzer prints. At the bottom of the map, in the right-hand corner, near Schnitzer signature, there is an imprint referencing Johann Andreas von Creutz, a Nuremburg printer active in the late 17th and early 187th centuries. The Creutz imprint appears to overwrite some of the original map text, so we can assume it was added later, probably after Creutz acquired the Fürst/Schnitzer plates, possibly from Funck's heirs, around 1709. Based upon the Creutz imprint, it is reasonable to assume that the presently offered edition probably dates to around this period. Although this view was clearly bound into a book with similar views of other cities, we have not been able to isolate the title or any known example of that work.