MMA014
Mapmaker
1571
Willem Janszoon Blaeu (1571-1638), was a Dutch cartographer, atlas maker, and publisher. Along with his son Johannes (or Joan) Blaeu, Willem is considered one of the notable figures of the Netherlandish or Dutch school of cartography during its golden age in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Willem Janz. Blaeu was the son of a well-to-do herring salesman, but his interests lay more in mathematics and astronomy. Between 1594 and 1596, as a student of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, he qualified as an instrument and globe maker. Once he returned to Holland, he made country maps and world globes, and as he possessed his own printing works, he was able to regularly produce country maps in an atlas format, some of which appeared in the Atlas Novus published in 1635. In 1633 he was appointed map-maker of the Dutch East India Company.
He had two sons, Johannes and Cornelis Blaeu, who continued their father's mapmaking and publishing business after his death in 1638.
Joan Blaeu (1596-1673), also called Johannes Blaeu, was the official cartographer of the Dutch East India Company. Blaeu is most notable for his map published in 1648, which was the first map to incorporate the heliocentric theory into a map of the world and was the first map that incorporated the discoveries of Abel Tasman. Blaeu renamed what is now New Zealand as Nieuw Zeeland after the Dutch province of Zeeland; the anglicized version of the name is still in use today.
The Atlas Maior is the final version of Joan Blaeu's atlas, published in Amsterdam between 1662 and 1672, in Latin (11 volumes), French (12 volumes), Dutch (9 volumes), German (10 volumes) and Spanish (10 volumes), containing 594 maps and around 3,000 pages of text. It was the largest and most expensive book published in the seventeenth century. Earlier, much smaller versions, titled Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, sive, Atlas Novus, were published from 1634 onwards. The Atlas Maior is widely considered a masterpiece of the Golden Age of Dutch/Netherlandish cartography (approximately 1570s–1670s).
A fire destroyed the studio and all of Blaeu's work in December 1672. Blaeu died a year later, 21 December 1673, in Amsterdam. He was survived by his son, Joan II, who continued his father's work until 1712.
Item Number: MMA014