Nicolaes VISSCHER II

1649 - 1702

Nicolaes Visscher II (the Younger) was born in Amsterdam in 1649 and died there in 1702. He was part of the prominent Visscher cartographic dynasty, one of the most influential families in the 17^th-century Dutch map-publishing trade. He was the son of cartographer and engraver Nicolaes Visscher I (1618-1679) and the grandson of Claes Janszoon Visscher (1587-1652), who had originally founded the family business. Raised and educated within the family’s Amsterdam workshop, Visscher received direct training in draftsmanship, copperplate engraving, and print publishing from his father, ensuring the precise continuity of the workshop’s technical and stylistic standards.

Following his father’s death in 1679, Visscher assumed control of the family firm, eventually moving its location to the Dam in Amsterdam while retaining the traditional trade signboard “In de Visscher”. In 1682, he secured a formal printing privilege from the States of Holland and West Friesland, granting him exclusive rights to protect his workshop’s output from unauthorised copying. Visscher altered the firm’s approach by increasingly incorporating his own original engravings rather than relying strictly on the older plates inherited from his grandfather. He specialised in creating highly detailed regional, continental, and topical military maps, frequently collaborating with contemporary mapmakers such as Frederick de Wit and Hugo Allard to expand his international distribution network. He was highly regarded for producing customisable composite atlases tailored to the budgets of individual buyers, publishing his own structurally indexed edition of the Atlas Minor around 1683, followed by Germania Inferior in 1684, alongside individual sheets such as the Exacta Totius Americae Tabula and Exacta Totius Asiae Tabula. Upon his death in 1702, the existing stock and printing plates passed to his widow, Elisabeth Verseyl, who managed the business until her own death in 1726, after which the family’s copperplates were acquired and reprinted by publisher Peter Schenk.

Nicolaes Visscher II is remembered as a major figure of the late Dutch Golden Age of cartography who successfully sustained his family’s publishing dynasty through a meticulous balance of geographic expansion and artistic engraving.