Fort St. George on the Coromandel Coast. Belonging to the East India Company of England. - Le fort St. George sur la cote de Coromandel. Appartemante a la Compagnie Angloise des Indes Orientales.

London, Laurie & Whittle, 1794.Contemporary handcoloured perspective view (vue d'optique or Guckkastenbild) after Jan van Ryne, with legend in English and French. Ca. 26 x 40 cm.Fine bird's-eye view from offshore of the fort in Madras, now Chennai, with many ships in the foreground by Jan van Ryne. He was a Dutch artist, who moved to London in 1750 and worked as a draughtsman and engraver in the city until his death ten years later. In 1754, Robert Sayer published six ‘Views of Early Settlements’, which were both drawn and engraved by van Ryne. The titles were: ‘Fort St. George on the Coromandel Coast’, ‘Bombay on the Malabar Coast’, ‘Fort William on the Kingdom of Bengal’, ‘The City of Batavia in the Island of Java’, ‘Island of St Helena’ and ‘The Cape of Good Hope’. Van Ryne presumably had no first-hand knowledge of these locations, but worked from the sketches of travellers. The prints were later reissued by Laurie and Whittle in London, in 1794. 'Madras was the Company's first fortified settlement in India; the construction of Fort St George began in 1640 and continued on and off for another 150 years. It houses all the administrative and military necessities, as well as St Mary's church (the oldest Anglican church in India), finished in 1680. The Old College, the equivalent of the Writers' Building in Calcutta, was one of the Company's few eighteenth-century buildings in the gothic style, and still stands' (Wild, The East India Company, p.52). Rare view of the first major English settlement in India and the foundation stone of Chennai. - Some foxing otherwise fine.