Gerard de Jode suffered in the shadows of his arch rival Abraham Ortelius although he was well established by the 1550s. His map of the British Isles is derived from the great eight-sheet wall map of Gerard Mercator published in Duisburg in 1564. That map survives in just five known examples. Despite following a clearly powerful precedent de Jode had the knowledge to study the map, his version for instance omits the fictitious Lake Antre in the present day Northern Ireland. Ortelius who also drew on the map in 1570, left it in. The evidence for Shirley dating this map to 1570 comes from the fact that the map has been found bound into de Jode’s rare atlas of Germany and Holland published in that year. However it is possible and probably more likely that it was produced slightly later and inserted in some later sold copies of the atlas.

The first state of the map lacks the ‘Cum Privilegio’ placed below the descriptive panel and granted for de Jode’s extremely rare atlas entitled ‘Speculum Orbis Terrarum’ of 1578. Three examples are known, both with and without text on the verso. The second state, also very rare, includes the privilege. It usually has text on the verso from the atlas, but here it is in the even rarer form where it is lacking. The text of this descriptive panel is drawn from the George Lily map of 1546. A comparison of the engraving with those of the remaining maps in the ‘Speculum’ engraved by the brothers Jan and Lucas van Deutecum shows that the British Isles was by another hand, most likely de Jode himself. Provenance: Burden Collection. Koeman (1967-70) Jod 1; Shirley (1991) 119; Van der Krogt, P. (Atlantes) 5000:32.