World Map Writing Set

Frederick de Wit was a mapmaker and publisher. He moved to Amsterdam in 1648 and studied under Willem Blaeu, and by 1654 he began his own business. He was already a well-established cartographic artist, engraving a plan of Haarlem around 1648 and providing city views for Antonius Sanderus’s ‘Flandria Illustrata’. He issued his own map of the world, ‘Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula’, as both a wall map and a folio in 1660. Two years later, he began to print atlases, which developed from small compositions mainly compiled of prints from bought stock to larger productions containing his own work. By the 1770s, de Wit was making atlases of over 150 maps.