Which Antique Map Makers Sell Best

Ask anyone who collects old maps to name a map maker and you will hear the same answer: Blaeu. The Amsterdam house of Willem and Joan Blaeu is the brand name of seventeenth-century cartography. So it is a little awkward that when you look at what people actually pay, Blaeu is not the most valuable signature on a sheet of engraved paper. He is not even in the top four.

This site runs on a database of around 800,000 real auction and marketplace results. After stripping out everything that is not a book, map or print — the jewellery, the model trains, the coins, the cars — 592,936 lots with a real sale price remain. Of those, 53,715 are map and topographical print lots that name the region they depict, and those are what this article is about.

The typical map lot in that set sells for €59. A lot carrying one of the famous engravers' names sells for €70 (23,532 lots), against €51 for everything unattributed (30,183 lots). So the name is worth something. Just not as much, and not in the order, that most people expect.

What each map maker actually fetches

Here is the typical price for every well-known name with enough lots to measure. "Typical" means the middle of the range — half the lots sold for less, half for more. It is a much more honest number than an average, because a single €7,000 wall map would drag an average around and tell you nothing about the sheet on your table.

The full table, with the numbers you need to weigh each figure. The "top tenth" column is the price above which only one lot in ten sells — it tells you how strong the good end of the market is for each name.

Map maker	Lots	Typical	Top tenth	Sold under €100
Braun & Hogenberg	1,817	€96	€370	51%
Matthäus Seutter	431	€96	€372	51%
Frederick de Wit	507	€90	€350	55%
Visscher	552	€90	€341	55%
Abraham Ortelius	1,825	€88	€400	52%
Blaeu	2,748	€84	€291	57%
J.B. Homann	1,081	€81	€280	57%
Johannes Janssonius	1,404	€77	€250	62%
Gerard Mercator	1,203	€71	€254	65%
Hondius	1,445	€69	€250	66%
Guicciardini	2,149	€69	€175	69%
Nicolas Sanson	581	€67	€201	67%
Sebastian Münster	975	€62	€217	70%
Merian	1,237	€60	€181	72%
Isaak Tirion	1,549	€60	€141	79%
Vincenzo Coronelli	269	€56	€220	69%
J.N. Bellin	1,553	€47	€120	84%
Robert de Vaugondy	945	€46	€105	88%

Two things jump out. Blaeu sits sixth, behind Braun & Hogenberg, Seutter, de Wit, Visscher and Ortelius. And the whole spread is narrow: the gap between the best-selling famous name and Blaeu is €12. Whatever the maker's name is doing to the price, it is doing far less than you would guess from the way dealers talk about it.

The bottom of the table is more decisive than the top. A Bellin or a Vaugondy — small eighteenth-century sheets, printed by the thousand to be bound into travel books — sells for under €100 in 84% and 88% of cases respectively. Those are the maps most likely to be sitting in a family portfolio.

Testing the obvious explanation: too many Blaeus?

The standard explanation for Blaeu's mid-table position is supply. The Blaeu workshop turned out enormous atlases, the copper plates were reused for decades, and a plate that printed for seventy years leaves far more survivors than one that printed for twenty. More survivors, lower price.

It is a good story and the database does back up the first half of it. Blaeu is the single most common name in the whole map set — 2,748 lots, more than Ortelius (1,825) or Braun & Hogenberg (1,817). The dates on Blaeu lots run from 1607 to 1680 for the middle 80% of them, a 73-year working span; Ortelius lots cluster into 1561–1620 and Braun & Hogenberg into 1561–1618, both under sixty years.

But the second half of the story does not survive contact with the data. If supply were driving price, the makers with the most lots would be the cheapest ones. They are not.

Across the 37 makers I could measure, the link between how many lots a maker has and what those lots fetch is essentially nil. Coronelli is one of the scarcest names in the set at 269 lots, and one of the cheapest at €56. Guicciardini has 2,149 lots and sells at €69; Braun & Hogenberg has almost as many at 1,817 and sells at €96.

So the tidy supply-and-demand story that everyone repeats — including, I will admit, the version of me that started this analysis — is not what the data shows. Rarity of a maker's name does not set the price of a sheet. That is a genuinely useful thing to know before you pay a premium for a "scarce" engraver.

Testing the second explanation: it is what they mapped

The better explanation is subject matter. Blaeu's most common surviving output is Dutch provincial maps, and Dutch maps are a mid-priced part of the market. Half of all Blaeu lots (1,349 of 2,748) depict the Netherlands. That could easily be dragging his average down without saying anything about Blaeu himself.

To test that, I compared each maker only against other maps of the same region — Blaeu's Italian maps against all Italian maps, his Dutch maps against all Dutch maps, and so on, then weighted the results together. This is the fair comparison, and it changes the picture less than you would think.

Map maker	Price vs other maps of the same region
Braun & Hogenberg	1.57×
Visscher	1.56×
Ortelius	1.53×
Seutter	1.53×
Covens & Mortier	1.45×
Jaillot	1.43×
Homann	1.41×
Frederick de Wit	1.41×
Blaeu	1.36×
Janssonius	1.35×
Hondius	1.24×
Mercator	1.23×
Münster	1.12×
Merian	1.02×
Coronelli	0.98×
Bellin	0.88×
Vaugondy	0.82×

Blaeu still comes sixth. A Blaeu sheet sells for about 1.36 times what a comparable map of the same region fetches; a Braun & Hogenberg sheet for 1.57 times. The region mix explains a little of the gap, but not the gap itself.

Look at them head to head and the shape is clear. Blaeu wins on his home ground and loses everywhere else.

Region	Blaeu	Braun & Hogenberg	Ortelius
Netherlands	€81 (n=1,349)	€77 (n=728)	€120 (n=268)
Belgium	€76 (n=203)	€80 (n=259)	€62 (n=65)
Italy	€140 (n=219)	€222 (n=114)	€102 (n=270)
France	€50 (n=197)	€100 (n=112)	€50 (n=166)
Germany	€54 (n=92)	€75 (n=135)	€50 (n=57)
Spain	€170 (n=25)	€200 (n=69)	€143 (n=54)

Braun & Hogenberg's advantage is not really about being a better name than Blaeu. It is about what they made. The Civitates Orbis Terrarum is a city book — bird's-eye views of individual towns — and a view of one specific town has a buyer in that specific town. A Braun & Hogenberg Granada or Naples has a Spanish or an Italian bidder in a way that Blaeu's sheet of the Duchy of Brabant, of which there are hundreds in circulation, simply does not.

What this means if you have a map to sell

Four things, in order of how much they will change your number.

The region matters more than the maker. The same engraver's work swings from €50 to €170 depending on what is drawn on it. I have written a companion piece on what maps of each region are worth that goes through this properly — if you only read one of the two, read that one.

Most maps are not expensive. Between half and nine-tenths of the lots for every name in the table sold under €100. That is consistent with the wider picture across the whole database, where 69.9% of everything sells under €100. A famous signature does not lift you out of that; it moves you a few euros up within it.

A famous name attached loosely is worth much less. Plenty of lots in this set read "after Blaeu" or "Mortier after J. Blaeu" — later strikes from reworked plates, or outright copies. They carry the name and not the price. When you read a listing, the words between the maker's name and the title are doing a lot of quiet work, which is the subject of our guide to reading an auction result properly.

Condition and colour are not in this data. I can measure the name on the sheet, not the margins, the foxing, or whether the hand colouring is period or modern. Two Ortelius sheets of the same map can differ threefold on condition alone. Treat every figure here as the middle of a wide range, not a valuation.

If you want to check your own sheet rather than a category, search the database directly for the maker and the region printed on it, and read the actual sold prices. For anything without a date, our piece on whether age makes an item valuable is worth ten minutes — the answer is less flattering than most people hope.

Figures derived from 592,936 priced book, map and print lots, of which 53,715 are map and topographical print lots identified by the region named in the lot title. Prices are what buyers actually paid, in euros.