Antwerp Map 1730 Seutter Plan of the City and Citadel Print - Antwerp, Citadel, Scheldt River, Brabant

This plan of Antwerp and its citadel, titled Plan de la Ville et Citadelle d'Anvers, was published by Matthaeus Seutter in Augsburg around 1730. The catalog calls it a fine old color example of Seutter's decorative and highly detailed plan, with a striking view of the city below, and it notes a fine dark impression. The plan shows the ramparts and the citadel in the manner of the eighteenth-century fortress plan, with the town laid out inside its walls. A view of the city below gives the plan a second, pictorial interest and makes the sheet a pleasure to look at from a distance as well as close up. Seutter, who was an Imperial Geographer, worked in Augsburg, and this plan shows the careful lettering and colors that were typical of his shop.

Matthaeus Seutter lived from 1678 to 1757 and was a prominent German mapmaker of the mid-eighteenth century. He was first apprenticed to a brewer, trained as an engraver under Johann Baptist Homann in Nuremberg, and then set up his own shop in his native Augsburg. In 1727 he was granted the title of Imperial Geographer. His most famous work is the Atlas Novus, published in two volumes around 1730, although most of his maps are based on earlier work by cartographers such as the Homanns and Delisle. This sheet therefore comes from the very years in which his workshop was at its most productive.

A collector of fortress plans, a family with roots in Antwerp, or a reader of the history of Brabant will find a lasting gift here. TheMapVault's sixteenth-century view of Antwerp by Braun and Hogenberg shows the city in the age of the Civitates, whereas this Seutter plan is an eighteenth-century fortress plan. Like every print in the collection, it ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes, from a compact desk piece to a large-format statement print.