The Workshop on the Keizersgracht: Jacob van Meurs and the Picturing of the World

How one Amsterdam engraver shaped what Europe believed the New World looked like, and where the line between report and invention runs

In July 1670 the States of Holland and West Friesland granted Jacob van Meurs, bookseller and engraver of Amsterdam, the sole right for fifteen years to print and sell a book called America, or a Description of the New World, written by Arnoldus Montanus. The document was signed by Johan de Witt, two years before his murder in The Hague. It forbade anyone else to reprint the work in any language, in whole or in part, in large format or small. A copy of that privilege is bound into the book itself, a few leaves after the dedication, and it is easy to walk past. It should not be. It explains how a single Amsterdam shop came to decide what the rest of Europe thought the world looked like.

Van Meurs described himself on his own title pages as Plaetsnyder en Boeckverkooper, engraver and bookseller, and he put the engraver first. That order was not modesty in reverse. Most publishers of the period sent their copperwork out to specialist shops and waited. Van Meurs cut his own, which meant he controlled the whole chain from the plate to the counter on the Keizersgracht, and it is the reason his house could produce folios at a rate nobody else could match. In 1665 came Johan Nieuhof on the Dutch embassy to the court of the Shunzhi Emperor in Peking. In 1669 came Montanus on the embassies to Japan. In 1670 came Olfert Dapper on Africa. In 1671 came America. Four continents in six years, each in a heavy folio stuffed with double page views, each engraved in the same workshop.

The result was that for a century or more, when a European imagined Nagasaki or Benin or Recife, he was in all likelihood imagining a Van Meurs plate.

Which raises the question of how much of it was true.

The honest answer is that it depends entirely on whether a drawing had come back. Where one had, the engravings are remarkable. The Brazilian views in the America of 1671 rest on material made in the field during the Dutch occupation of the 1630s and 1640s, in the circle around Johan Maurits of Nassau, who brought painters and draughtsmen with him to Pernambuco. Frans Post and Zacharias Wagener are the names that survive. Their work had already reached print through Barlaeus, and it lies behind the panorama of Mauritiopolis, the harbour of Olinda, the forts lettered along the Bay of All Saints, the mouth of the Paraiba, the siege of Porto Calvo. Look at those plates and you are looking, at two removes, at something somebody stood in front of. The book is dedicated to Johan Maurits and carries his portrait, and that is not a courtesy. It is an acknowledgement of where the pictures came from.

Where no drawing had come back, the workshop supplied the gap. American towns acquire Dutch rooflines. Animals are cut from written descriptions by men who had never seen one, with results that range from the plausible to the frankly mythological, and somewhere in the series a unicorn is grazing. John Ogilby brought the whole thing out in London in the same year under the title America: being the latest, and most accurate description of the New World, using Van Meurs's own plates, which has amused bibliographers ever since.

It would be easy to treat this as a failure. It is more interesting to treat it as a record. The line between the reported and the invented runs visibly through the book, and you can follow it with your finger.

That line is the thread running through a great deal of what we handle.

It begins with the compilers who had no pictures at all. Giovanni Battista Ramusio, secretary to the Venetian Council of Ten, spent decades gathering the testimony of merchants and ambassadors into his Navigationi et Viaggi, and worked almost entirely in words. Peter Martyr and Girolamo Benzoni wrote from the Spanish world with the authority of men who had at least been near it. When Theodor de Bry began issuing his Grands Voyages at Frankfurt from 1590, the balance shifted: here was a publisher who understood that the engraving, not the text, was what would sell, and who was prepared to invent when the sources ran thin. De Bry is Van Meurs's true ancestor, eighty years earlier.

Then there are the books that carried real information and knew it. Jan Huygen van Linschoten's account, published in Amsterdam in 1596 and in London by John Wolfe in 1598, was a working document: sailing directions, soundings, the locations of Portuguese strongholds, the things a Dutch or English captain needed to break into a trade that had been closed to him. It was printed to be used, and it was. Herrera's maps of the Spanish audiencias, engraved for the official history of the Indies, are administrative documents rather than pictures, drawn to show who governed what. The Spieghel der Australische navigatie of 1621, recording Le Maire and Schouten's discovery of a way around Cape Horn, is a report on something that had just happened and could be checked.

And then there is the moment of reckoning, which is really what the America of 1671 is. By the time it appeared, Dutch Brazil had been lost for seventeen years and New Netherland for seven. The book is not a prospectus for an empire. It is an inventory of one that had gone, compiled by a minister in Schoonhoven who never crossed an ocean, out of the papers of men who had, and illustrated by an engraver who had not either. Published, appropriately enough, in the year before the Dutch Republic nearly lost everything at home as well.

The plates of Mauritsstad outlived the place they recorded. That, in the end, is what these books are for.