Out of all the great 18th century French map makers, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon D'Anville was in many ways the most scientifically demanding and the most meticulous. Born in 1697, he lived for eighty-five years until 1782. His life was packed with scholastic study and achievement. He published his first map at the age of fifteen. By the age of twenty, he had been made one of the Cartographers to the King; in 1737, he was employed to provide the maps for Jean Du Halde's new Jesuit survey of China, a body of work which was used as a geographical basis for European knowledge of that country for the next century and a half. During his life, his maps continued to gain a reputation for exacting scientific accuracy, including the novel approach of integrating local descriptions and cartography onto his own maps wherever available. In 1754 he was made a member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres and in 1775 he was made a member of the Academie des Sciences.



His atlases are difficult to collate as they seemed to have been bound mainly according to the specific needs of particular clients. Published under the generic name of the "Atlas General", the were published from approximately 1740 onwards, with examples being found up to the early 1770s and the maps within having a wide range of dates.



This map of the world is archetypal of D'Anville's style. It was issued as either two separate maps, one of each hemisphere or two sheets joined into one map. Its sparse scientific style, with huge swathes of the unknown interior of the continents contrasts starkly with areas of known geography, such as Europe or in D'Anville's case, China, Tibet and Tartary. Due to the French Crown's political interests, there is also a relatively good knowledge of the Middle Eastern regions of Iran, the Levant and Turkey, much of which was under the Ottoman Empire at this time. In contrast the continents of Africa, Australia and the Americas are relatively blank. Australia is drawn according to the information provided by Tasman and other Dutch explorers in the mid 17th century. D'Anville corrected the shape of Africa according to his own studies but left the interior blank as was his habit, providing only details of which had read himself such as the Portuguese colony of the Congo, the North African coast and Egypt, about which he knew from his studies of the Ottoman Empire. North America is particularly stark, especially the western regions.



Despite D'Anville's meticulous nature, there were certain geographical myths which were so ubiquitous on other maps of the day that even he could not ignore them despite their lack of confirmation. Therefore, the American West still bears the famous "River of the West" first plotted by Lahontan at the turn of the 18th century, although its course is dotted and the tracing is very faint. Faint inlets alluding to the explorations of Juan de Fuca and Admiral de Fonte are also shown on the west coast but most prominent is the vast possible new outline of the upper north Pacific coast of North America, speculating on the latest Russian discoveries as communicated by Joseph Nicholas de L'Isle and Gerhard Muller. In the Far East, the mythical "Company's Land" based on the reports of Marteen de Vries of 1643 is still present albeit far reduced from its heyday.



This map bears the date of 1761 although the David Rumsey Map Collection owns an example, also dated 1761, showing Cook's discoveries of New South Wales in Australia made in 1769-71, suggesting that the date did not change but that it was substantially updated during its publishing life.



Our example is one of the early versions, with an incomplete Australia and with a touch of original outline colour.



The printed image of each map measures appx. 24 x 26in. SL [WLD4089]