Hollar Hull

In the late fifteenth and into the early nineteenth-centuries, printed maps were created by taking impressions from etched or engraved metal plates, usually made of copper.

This was obviously a time consuming and labour intensive operation with the maps having to be inked and their impression made on paper or a suitable medium on an individual basis.

Copper was, and remains today, a valuable raw material and very few original copper-plates have survived on the basis that there were always more value added uses for the material. If you bear in mind that maps originating on copper masters in particular were evolving and changing in Great Britain as it emerged into the post Civil War and the later Industrial Revolution then it is no surprise that as the information became out date  they were melted down and re-used.

Some copper plates did have long lives, but once their commercial usefulness was over, or  if ‘antiquarian’ interest was exhausted, they went into the melting pot.

One superb example that has survived is a perfect imprint of my home city, Hull, copper etched and identified under it's full name of Kingston Upon Hull in 1640.

Bohemian artist Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677) was probably the greatest exponent of the craft of copper plate map making.

He was active in mid seventeenth-century England having arrived in London in 1636.

It was a momentous era in British history and he sided with the  Royalists during the Civil War. . Their ultimate defeat forced him to take refuge in Antwerp, until it was safe for him to return to London in 1650.

Following the Restoration he was appointed 'Scenographer' or designer of Prospects to the King’.

In spite of an illustrious career path which will have elevated him in social standing and wealth he actually died in penury, “owning little more than his bed and a few pots and pans” (Worms/Baynton-Williams Dictionary of Map Engravers, Rare Book Society 2011;

The importance of the Hull copper plate is that it is a unique record of my home City, particularly as the relentless progress of social and economic change over the proceeding 300 years, urbanisation, wartime bombing in both world conflicts and a later widespread Civic endorsed vandalism of monuments and heritage has meant that many of the depicted features have been lost.

In the upper part of the metal plate is a view of the city and its Port fortifications taken from the Humber.

Hull has the status of being the first point of conflict of the English Civil War when Charles 1st was denied access at the Beverley Gate entrance to the city in his bid to make use of a substantial arsenal of munitions there is an inset map of the general environs. Authentication is in the form of Hollar’s own signature which can be seen bottom centre, below the town plan itself.

Delicately etched, and as a testament to the skill of the engraver, everything is reversed.

The lines and detail were as a result of the application of acid. This must have been hazardous to health in the pre-safety conscious environment but obviously second nature to a  professional like Hollar.

It appears that mirror writing was something he could do naturally even though the workmanship of the Hull plate will have demanded great concentration and application.  

Not many of Hollar’s original plates are known to have survived. He produced numerous maps and a handful of topographical views including a famous vista of London before and after the Great Fire (1666) among the most impressive.

The future of the Hull plate was for some time in the balance.

It was offered for sale in the late eighteenth-century, appearing in printseller Robert Sayer’s catalogue of 1766 and in Laurie & Whittle’s of 1795. Also in the 1790’s an entirely new plate, following Hollar’s map, was engraved by Isaac Taylor (1759-1829 - being the second of the two Isaacs in Worms/Baynton-Williams) which was used to illustrate John Tickell’s The History of the town and country of Kingston-upon-Hull.

It is therefore remarkable that the original copperplate survived:

In 1933, it was in the possession of Hull printing firm Richard Johnson & Sons before, making its was into a Nationally important Archive in the map collection at the British Library.

Hollar’s  Hull plate  is now on public display in the Treasures gallery in the British Library at St Pancras, selected from 4.5 million other maps and atlases in the  National map collection.

It is truly a thing of beauty.