Thomas Jefferys (c.1720-1771) British, "A Map of the Most Inhabited Part of New England." Print. Likely the 3rd Edition or later, as the 2nd Edition in 1760 added the map of the city of Boston in the upper left corner and the 3rd Edition was the first to be hand-colored. 

Overall Size: 31 x 29 3/4 in. 

Sight Size: 27 1/2 x 26 1/4 in. 

#5024 . 

Thomas Jefferys was born around 1719 in England, and became one of the more prominent commercial cartographers in London during the middle of the 18th Century. The English had made manuscript maps, charts, and surveys since their earliest settlements in Virginia and New England, but few of these cartographic productions were ever printed, and it wasn’t until the late 1690s that rapid expansion generated enough interest among the public to want to acquire these maps of far-off lands. Jeffreys first appears in the Merchant Taylors Company records as an apprentice to the map maker Emmanuel Bowen, beginning in 1735. His first major achievement was engraving twenty maps for Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine starting in 1746, the same year that he received the Court appointment of “geographer” to Frederick, Prince of Wales, and his reputation grew considerably from there. In 1750 Jefferys set up a shop in Charing Cross, midway between the economic center of London and the government center of Westminster, and got married as well. In 1757 he became the geographer to George, Prince of Wales, ultimately “Geographer to the King” when George ascended in 1760. The dramatic rise in map production and demand due to the Seven Years War (1756-63) gave Jefferys’s business a massive boost. Although he was responsible for a wide variety of prints and for maps of much of the world, Jeffreys is particularly remembered for his publication of many maps of North America, such as the Map of the Most Inhabited Part of New England (1755). Jefferys did not himself compile this map, nor was he a geographer, but rather an extremely skilled engraver and a publisher of maps which other people had compiled and drawn, and it became his best-selling plate of all time. It was likely compiled by John Green, a surveyor he had hired who committed suicide in 1757. Demand for maps of North America and East Asia dropped off after the end of the Seven Years War, and his new work emphasized a surge in interest in large-scale surveys of individual English counties. Sadly, he put most of his money on this new “fad,” and declared bankruptcy in 1766. To rebuild his fortune, he partnered with Robert Sayer, a successful publisher of many genres, and they focused on reprints of his most popular existing plates. After Jefferys died in 1771 Sayer bought up more of Jefferys’ plates and, with a new partner, John Bennett, published several new editions of them, including the American Atlas of 1775, one of the best-selling items in the British Empire for the rest of the century due to the American Revolution.

Good.