Piter van den Keere Biography - Infos for Sellers and Buyers

Piter van den Keere

Gent 1570 - Gent 1630

Pieter van den Keere (also Peter Kaerius) was born in 1570 in Gent and died there in 1630. Van den Keere, the son of the printer and type founder Hendric van den Keere the Younger, fled to London because of religious unrest and persecution and worked there as an engraver.
His earliest plates can be found in John Norden's "Speculum Britanniae" (1593), including ariel views of London and Westminster Abbey. Pieter van den Keere returned to Holland in 1596 and settled in Amsterdam, where he lived and worked until his death. Besides his activities as an engraver, he became a publisher in 1609.
In this capacity, he provided several globes to the admiralty in Rotterdam in 1613. The atlas of the Netherlands "Germania inferior" appeared in 1617, bearing his name as the publisher and his full signature on several of the maps.
In addition to various topographical folio pages, including those of Amsterdam (1618) and Nuremberg (1619), Pieter van den Keere engraved a world map ("Nova totius terrarum orbis...") in 1621, which was printed by Jan Janzoon in Amsterdam. It seems he ran a lively engraving business starting in 1620, as an inventory taken in 1623 shows many listings for this type of work.