Lewis Evans

Lewis Evans was born around 1700 in Llangwnnadl, Caernarfonshire, Wales. By the mid-1730s he had emigrated to British colonial America and settled in Philadelphia, where he worked as a surveyor, geographer, and mapmaker. He is associated with Benjamin Franklin, who published some of his cartographic work.

Evans produced his first major map, "A Map of Pensilvania, New Jersey, New York and the three Delaware counties," in 1749, followed in 1755 by his best-known work, "A General Map of the Middle British Colonies, in America." The 1755 map became an essential reference during the French and Indian War and later the American Revolution, and it is regarded by historians of American cartography as one of the most influential maps of the colonial period.

Evans died in New York in June 1756, in his mid-fifties. Sources vary between June 11 and June 12 for the exact date, and the circumstances of his final months are not fully confirmed in the sources reviewed for this profile.

Evans is treated by historians of cartography and by rare-map dealers as a central figure in the mapping of the Middle Atlantic colonies, valued less for artistic style than for accuracy, geographic ambition, and documented military and political use of his 1755 map in the decades after its publication. No verbatim assessment from a named critic in a major contemporary outlet could be confirmed for inclusion here.

Evans has no market in the contemporary art-gallery sense; his work circulates through the rare-map and Americana auction trade. The best-documented result is a first-edition example of the 1755 "General Map of the Middle British Colonies," which sold for USD 125,000 at Swann Auction Galleries in New York in 2019, as reported by the BBC. Specialist commentary has separately referenced a first-edition, first-state example with Siebert provenance selling for approximately USD 204,000 through Arader Galleries, but the exact date is unconfirmed and it is unclear whether this was a public auction sale, so it is treated here as unverified and is not presented as the confirmed record. Because so few original examples of Evans's maps come to market in a given year, any single sale should be read against edition state, coloring, and condition rather than as a stable price trend.

There is no catalogue raisonne and no gallery or estate representation; authentication rests on the specialist rare-map trade, which evaluates edition state, plate variants, coloring, and provenance history. Public sales are infrequent, and the two figures circulating in the market (a confirmed USD 125,000 sale in 2019 and an unconfirmed report near USD 204,000) illustrate how much a single example's condition and provenance can move its price. Collectors should also be careful with the name itself: Lewis Evans is shared with an unrelated English scientific-instrument collector (1853 to 1930), a Welsh mathematician (1755 to 1827), and at least one living contemporary artist selling work under the same name, none of whom should be confused with the colonial-era surveyor and mapmaker described here.