Merian (Matthaus)

sambt dem erschrocklichen brandt daselsten, fo 4 tagen lange gewehrt hatt. Ao.1666. im 7bris,
Frankfurt, , c.1670.
a dramatic record of the Great Fire of London by Matthäus Merian the Younger (1621-1687), made only a few years after the event, it had started as a minor accident in a bakery in Pudding Lane on the 2nd September, 1666, it quickly took hold and spread rapidly amongst the tight-knit, highly flammable, timber-framed buildings of the medieval city. It raged for four days and destroyed around 13,000 buildings, including the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall and St Paul’s Cathedral, as well as over 80 churches. A key to twenty of the more important buildings appears in a large banderole across the bottom of the composition, with the extensive title in two lines in the sky above the flames.

Merian chose an elevated perspective view looking northwards over Southwark and the Thames towards the conflagration at its height. The sweeping foreground follows a long bend in the river from Westminster to the Tower of London, and appears to be largely derived from that section of the famous panorama from the 1640s by Wenceslaus Hollar, itself partly based on the 1616 panorama by Claes Visscher. This helps explain the anomalous presence in both this view and Hollar’s of the Globe Theatre, which had been closed and in 1642, and demolished soon after. In both instances the single rotunda of the theatre is mislabelled as ‘Beere Baytingh’, with the title ‘Globe’ seeming to apply to a pub on the riverbank, probably as Visscher’s original showed the bear garden occupying a near-identical second circular building, not present in either of the later views..
220 by 355mm (8¾ by 14 inches).