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Pieter van den Keere (Latin: Petrus Kaerius; 1571 – c. 1646) was a Flemish engraver, publisher and globe maker who worked for the most part of his career in England and the Dutch Republic.

Pieter van den Keere was born in Ghent in 1571, the son of the engraver and type founder Hendrik van den Keere and Elisabeth van Estelaer.^[1][2]

During his childhood the family left the Spanish Netherlands for religious reasons and moved to London around 1583–1584.^[1] Among his siblings was the engraver Colette van den Keere, who emigrated with the family and later married the cartographer Jodocus Hondius.^[3]

While living in London, van den Keere trained as an engraver under Hondius, who became both his brother-in-law and professional mentor.^[4]

In 1593, van den Keere and Hondius relocated to Amsterdam. There he was betrothed on 7 September 1599 to Anna Burts (or Beurt) of Ghent. Records indicate that he became betrothed again in Amsterdam on 10 March 1623 to a widow from Hoorn, Anna Winnens van Gent, possibly following the death of his first wife.^[5]

After about 1630, few details of van den Keere’s life are known. However, the dating of some engraved plates used in John Speed‘s Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World (1646) suggests that he was still alive at that time.

From his time in England there is a map of Ireland from 1592, Hyberniae novissima descriptio. It was published by Hondius and served as a model for later editions of the Theatrum of Abraham Ortelius. Keere also contributed to John Norden‘s Speculum Britanniae of 1593.

For Willem Barents Keere engraved plates for Caertboeck Vande Middel-landsche Zee. He also worked with Petrus Bertius, Cornelis Claesz, Petrus Plancius, the House of Visscher,^[6] and Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer. In 1595, there appeared a large wall map of Europe in 10 sheets, Nova totius Europae descriptio.

From 1603, Keere began creating large urban panoramas, including Utrecht, Cologne, Amsterdam, and Paris. Around 1604, he was preparing the publication of the atlas Germania Inferior id est Provincuarum XVII. This first appeared in 1617, with a foreword by Petrus Montanus.

A series of 44 plates for the British Isles, from about 1599, took a long time to publish. They were based on Christopher Saxton, Ortelius, and Giovanni Battista Boazio, respectively for England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. They appeared in 1617 in a Latin edition of the Britannia of William Camden, by Willem Blaeu. Later, these plates came to William Humble or George Humble^[7] (according to Royal Geographical Society fellow, Carl Moreland and David Bannister—map dealer—in “Antique Maps”) who issued them (with some modification and expansion) in 1627 as a miniature version of the atlas of John Speed. Thereby van den Keere’s works came by the name “Miniature Speeds”.^[8]

Carl Moreland and David Bannister in “Antique Maps” state that in 1627 publisher George Humble “published a major edition of Speed’s Atlas,” who in turn “also issued” the van den Keere maps “as a pocket edition. For these he used the descriptive texts of the larger Speed maps and thereafter they were known as Miniature Speeds”. Moreland and Bannister also write that “of the 63 maps in the Atlas, 40 were from the original van den Keere plates.”^[8]