Biography

Dutch mapmaker and publisher. Born in Elberfeld, Germany in 1660, he moved to Amsterdam in 1683 where he became a pupil of Gerard Valck. He soon became an extremely skilled exponent of the so-called zwarte kunst (mezzotint engraving). In 1686 he is noted in a privilege granted to Petrus Schenck and Gerardus Valck for the printing and sale of their prints. The best known of the joint Pieter Schenk and Gerard Valck publications were the second edition of Andreas Cellarius's Celestial Atlas Harmonia Macrocosmica [1708] and an edition of Jan Jansson's Novus Atlas entitled the Atlas Anglois published in London by David Mortier in 1715.

With their copublishers, the Schenk family was among the most prolific and best-known publishers in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. Many of the atlases they produced were primarily reissues from earlier printing plates that the family purchased from other cartographers. Their work, though often not original, was finely presented and demonstrates the precision and elegance associated with maps and engravings produced in the period.

Schenck maintained his links with his native Germany and had a shop in Leipzig, which was taken over by his son Pieter II.