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Full original color example of Frederick De Wit's striking double hemisphere map of the World, published in Amsterdam in about 1670.
The map shows the Briggs model of California as an Island. There is a single Great Lake, open to the west. Anian and the Straits of Anian are shown.
The brilliant scenes in the corners combine images of the four seasons, the elements, and the signs of the zodiac in a well-balanced and natural way. According to Shirley, De Wit's map is one of the most attractive of its time.
There are two states of the map:
- State 1: no outer decorative border. Blank cusps between the two hemispheres.
- State 2: outer border added. Cherubs added between the cusps.
De Wit (1629 ca.-1706) was a mapmaker and mapseller who was born in Gouda but who worked and died in Amsterdam. He moved to the city in 1648, where he opened a printing operation under the name of The Three Crabs; later, he changed the name of his shop to The White Chart. From the 1660s onward, he published atlases with a variety of maps; he is best known for these atlases and his Dutch town maps. After Frederik’s death in 1706, his wife Maria ran the shop for four years before selling it. Their son, Franciscus, was a stockfish merchant and had no interest in the map shop. At the auction to liquidate the de Wit stock, most of the plates went to Pieter Mortier, whose firm eventually became Covens & Mortier, one of the biggest cartography houses of the eighteenth century.
![Mappe-Monde ou Carte Generale du Globe Terrestre, Representee en deux Plan-Hemispheres [World Map or General Map of the Earth, Represented in Two Plan-Hemispheres]](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/93262.jpg)
