A print made in Italy around a decade after the Great Fire of London is up for sale, and shows the conflagration at its height.
This print is by the Old Masters artist and occasional soldier/diplomat, Gabriel Gualdo Priorato can even by the standards of the time, it’s rather peculiar in how it shows London.
The print is titled, Incendio della Gran Città di Londra Metropoli del Regno d’Inghilterra Succaesso adi 21 di Settembre 1666, and demonstrates how the Great Fire of London was an international news story even at a time when international news hardly existed.
I would suspect that the artist took an existing drawing of London, almost certainly Claes Visscher’s panorama of 1600, and embellished it.
He’s added the flames, taken out a few buildings next to the Thames and replaced them with hop stores, and most curious of all, added a new river next to the Tower of London, probably misunderstanding the Visscher drawing of a riverside dock.
Other prints have come on the market in the past, and the British Museum owns a copy, although most of them have been black and white, unlike this one which is in colour.
This one is being sold by Bonhams (you can zoom in to the print on their website) with an estimate of £1,000 to £1,500.
