De Gekroonde Konst en Kaart Winckel / Batavia

Clement de Jonghe was an Amsterdam art dealer, print seller, and map publisher active in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Born in northern Germany, he moved to Amsterdam around 1643 and built a substantial business in prints, maps, and copperplates. His shop in the Kalverstraat was known as De Gekroonde Konst- en Kaart Winckel, or “The Crowned Art and Map Shop.”

This small engraved print functioned as a business card or advertisement for De Jonghe’s shop. It shows De Jonghe presenting a large plan or view of Batavia to customers inside his art and map shop. The title, De Gekroonde Konst en Kaart Winckel / Batavia, links the Amsterdam print trade directly with the Dutch colonial and commercial world of Southeast Asia.The print is important as evidence for how maps were sold, displayed, and consumed in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Rather than presenting Batavia as a standalone city view or navigational document, it shows the map as an object of commerce within a specialist print shop. In this sense, the sheet records both the subject of Dutch overseas geography and the urban market through which such images circulated.

The ornamental frame is in the auricular or kwab style and has been associated on stylistic grounds with Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, a pupil of Rembrandt. The attribution remains stylistic, but the elaborate frame gives the business card the visual ambition of a small presentation print rather than a simple trade label.