Although now is he is best known for his cartographic works, Pinkerton was famous, infamous and notorious for his views in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Born in Scotland in 1758, he briefly practised law but changed career to a writer and, having moved to London in 1781, he published a series of articles, books and essays mainly about Scottish history and antiquities. He is most controversial for attempting to prove that the settlement of Scotland was less Celtic and more Germanic in origin; one of his assertions was that the Picts were in fact a German tribe who moved across Northern Europe as opposed to being part of the Celtic migration. He was very forthright in presenting his arguments and could be quite vitriolic.



In 1818 he moved to Paris where he died in 1826.



His contribution to cartography was less controversial. He was a member of a group of mapmakers working during the late Georgian period, who were part of a movement which espoused science over artistry on maps. They viewed themselves very much as part of the Age of Reason.



This is a fine example of Pinkerton's map of the world as a double hemisphere, published on two sheets. Geographically it is based mainly on the new advances as portrayed by the great surge of English map makers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, such as John Cary, Aaron Arrowsmith and William Faden, all of whom produced variations of maps in this format. Geographically, they would have based their maps on reports of explorers such a Carsten Niebuhr for Arabia, Mungo Park for West Africa, Flinders and Bass to show the Bass Straits in Australia and Hearne and MacKenzie for Canada and the west of north America.



Pinkerton's maps were noted for their clarity and the quality of their engraving, with the atlas being reissued several times between 1808-15. There was a further American edition in the United States in 1818. The English editions of the maps are usually dated individually.



The printed image of each sheet measures appx. 20 x 21in. The page size for each map is roughly 31 x 22in. Original hand colour. SL [WLD3408]