Gerard van Schagen
Dutch cartographer
Gerrit Lucasz van Schagen or Schaagen (Latinised as Gerardus a Schagen; c. 1642 – c. March 1724) was an engraver and cartographer from Amsterdam, known for his exquisite reproductions of maps, particularly of those by Nicolaes Visscher I and Frederick de Wit. He lived and worked in Amsterdam, on the Haarlemmerdijk near the New Haarlem sluice at the house with the sign "In de Stuurman".
Biography
The surname suggests that Gerrit or his father Lucas may have been born in Schagen. On 24 April 1677 he married Gertruij Govers van Schendel/Schijndel. At this occasion he was "from Amsterdam, plaetsnijder (engraver) from profession, 35 years old, and living on the Haarlemmerdijk." After the death of Geertruij in September 1690, Gerrit, as widower of Geertruij and still living on the Haarlemmerdijk, remarried on 7 October 1695 with the 34-year old Anna Cornelis. Gerrit and Anna baptized children between 1697 and 1701 and together were witnesses at other baptisms as late as June 1712.
Career
Gerrit Lucasz van Schagen worked in Amsterdam as an engraver and publisher of maps during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. His work focused largely on producing carefully engraved versions of maps originally created by well-known Amsterdam cartographers such as Nicolaes Visscher I and Frederick de Wit. In the Amsterdam map trade of the period, it was common for engravers to reproduce or adapt successful maps so that they could continue to circulate in new printings and formats.
Van Schagen produced a number of engraved maps of the world and of individual continents.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gerard van Schagen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.