Jun 13, 2024 - Sale 2672

Sale 2672 - Lot 96

Price Realized: $ 25,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 25,000 - $ 35,000
(NEW YORK CITY.) Bernard Ratzer. [The Ratzen Plan] To His Excellency Sr. Henry Moore. Bart., Captain General and Governour in Chief, In & Over the Province of New York... This Plan of the City of New York, is Most Humbly Inscribed. Large engraved map of lower Manhattan with a fine Rococo dedicatory cartouche also presenting a 31-point reference key to contemporary forts, churches, schools, municipal buildings, and markets. 2 sheets hinged with linen at center, 24¼x36½ inches overall; original hand-color to interior pond areas; mounted on later linen backing with modern selvage, repairs at center seam, scattered stains and soft creases, minor surface abrasions including at the final letter of the author's name, i.e., a correction of sorts. With a handsome gilt and black gesso frame. London, [1769]
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"...among the most accurately and beautifully executed and detailed plans of any American colonial city" -- Cumming.

"...perhaps the finest map of an American city and its environs produced in the eighteenth century... its geographic precision combined with highly artistic engraving was unsurpassed in the urban cartography of its day. It affords a rare and vivid picture of New York as a small, charming city set in a richly variegated landscape" -- Cohen & Augustyn.

Ratzer's map lays out on a large scale the developed mid-eighteenth-century wards, streets, and waterfront piers of lower Manhattan, extending to show the topography to the north which includes large garden estates and wooded farmland of several early landowners (Lispenard, Bayard, Delancy, Depeyster, Rutgers, etc.) as well as the "Brookland Ferry" across the East River.

Bernard Ratzer was a military surveyor and cartographer who demonstrated promising talent for the British during the French and Indian War. In 1767 the governor of New York, Henry Moore, appointed Ratzer to improve upon John Montresor's map of the city, a work believed by Moore to be imprecise. Ratzer conducted the survey and shipped his manuscript to London for Thomas Kitchin to do the engraving. For all of Kitchin's otherwise excellent work engraving the plan and its topography, he did ultimately end up with one fundamental mistake: Ratzer's name in the cartouche is misspelled as "Ratzen"; a reasonable but vital error, though one which allows connoisseurship a path to affectionately differentiate this map from Ratzer's subsequent major publication.

W.P. Cumming, The Montresor-Ratzer-Sauthier Sequence of Maps of New York City, 1766-76, Imago Mundi, volume 31, pages 55-65; Cohen & Augustyn, Manhattan in Maps, pages 73-77; Deak, Picturing America, 120.