Book Fairs | March 13, 2025

16th Century Cartographer's Library Recreated at TEFAF Maastricht

Daniel Crouch Rare Books

Title page of Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer's Thresoor Der Zeevaert… Amsterdam, Cornelius Claesz., [?1602]. Offered at £80,000.

Daniel Crouch Rare Books will bring to an exhibition celebrating the cartographic innovations of the Dutch Golden Age to TEFAF Maastricht which runs March 15 – 20 2025. 

The exhibition will recreate the library of Dutch cartographer Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer (c.1534 – c.1606) with a Kussenkast (‘cushion cupboard’) filled with extraordinary maps, atlases, globes, and scientific instruments. It will transport visitors back to the birthplace of Free Trade, the Dutch Golden Age (c.1588 – c.1672). Its achievements were due in no small part to Dutch prowess in navigation, cartography, and instrument-making, and it is these skills – and the art of the mapmaker – that will be on show.

Taking the striking frontispiece from Waghenaer’s Thresoor der zeevaert… (1592) as inspiration, the exhibition will include:

  • Willem and Janszoon Blaeu’s 1652 Stedeboek, with the coat-of-arms of James Butler,  1st Duke of Ormond
  • Janszoon Blaeu the Younger’s monumental Atlas Major (1665)
  • Lucas Jansz Waghenaer’s Spieghel der zeevaerdt (1585), the first Dutch sea atlas
  • a 1625 celestial globe by Petrus  Plancius

The exhibition at TEFAF Maastricht will also feature the ‘Saphea’, an astrolabe in Arabic from 13th century Moorish Spain. 

Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Discours of Voyages unto ye Easte & West Indies, 1598
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Daniel Crouch Rare Books

Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Discours of Voyages unto ye Easte & West Indies, 1598