Filter by Price
Filter by Date printed
Map or print
Region
Artist or cartographer
Subject matter
Provenance
Size

Keere, Pieter van den

Pieter van den Keere (1571- c.1646) was a Flemish engraver who worked for most of his career in London and the Dutch Republic. Born in Ghent, his family emigrated to London around 1583-4 for religious reasons. His sister Colette married Jodocus Hondius three years later; in London he was trained as an engraver by Hondius, his brother-in-law. In 1593, both Keere and Hondius moved back to Amsterdam. He frequently signed his work with his Latin name of Petrus Kaerius.

Van den Keere engraved a series of 44 plates of parts of the British Isles from about 1599. They were published in 1617 in a Latin edition of Camden's "Britannia" by Willem Blaeu. The plates later came into the possession of William or George Humble who published them (with some modification and expansion) in 1627 as a pocket or miniature version of John Speed's atlas "Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine". Hence Keere's works came to be known as "Miniature Speeds". Of the 63 maps in the Atlas, 40 were from the original van den Keere plates, and the remainder by an unknown hand.