Johannes Kip

From Amsterdam, Kip was briefly apprenticed there with the printmaker Bastiaen Stopendaal, before setting up his own business. Kip’s earliest known engravings dated from 1672. In 1686, he engraved six portraits of William of Orange, his wife and attendants near The Hague; and when William and Mary attained the English throne, after the Glorious Revolution in 1689, Kip travelled to England.

Kip is best known for a series of bird’s-eye prospects of country houses, gardens and parks of the Augustan age. The book was first published in 1707, when David Mortier issued the first eighty plates under the title Britannia Illustrata. A French translation, as Nouveau Theatre, appeared in 1708. It is likely that Kip sold his interests in the work soon afterwards, but the work expanded over time with the addition of an atlas Atlas Anglois, published and sold separately after 1714 when Mortier acquired the Schenk and Valk plates from Amsterdam. A second part was added to volume one in 1716, to accommodate the engravings by Kip, previously published in Sir Robert Atkyn’s The Ancient and Present State of Glocestershire (1712) with an additional nine plates, and a Supplement which contains a rare series of engravings of Audley End.

Kip’s next great work was a twelve-sheet view of St James’s Park from Buckingham House in 1710; and he was commissioned by Godfrey Kneller to survey his new house in about 1715.