Matthäus Merian

He is often mixed up with his father, the Basel engraver whose bird's-eye views of European cities fill half the print rooms of the continent. This is the son, born in Basel in 1621 with the same name, who chose the brush over the family's copper plates.

At 18 he was in London, working in the studio of Anthony van Dyck, the Flemish master then painting the English court, and that grand portrait manner stayed with him. Later he went to the peace congress at Nuremberg, where the terms ending the Thirty Years' War, the long religious conflict that had wrecked central Europe, were being settled, and he made portraits of the men taking part.

After his father died in 1650 he returned to Frankfurt and, with his brother Caspar, kept the family publishing house going, bringing out more volumes of the Topographia, its great illustrated survey of German towns. He spent his last years back inside the trade he had once left, dying in 1687.