Jean Baptiste Bourguignon D'Anville (1697-1782)
Profile :
Following the death of Guillaume Delisle, D'Anville continued the line of progressive French cartographers which had begun with Nicolas Sanson in the previous century.
He is said to have designed his first map at the age of fifteen and in a long and active life he produced a great number of elegantly engraved maps, noted for their scholarship and accuracy. If anything, he was even more critical of the work of his predecessors than Delisle and his exacting standards soon brought him international recognition as the finest cartographer of his time. In fact, during his whole life he never travelled outside Paris but he built up a vast collection of cartographic material which eventually was passed to the Bibliotheque Nationale.
He was specially interested in the geography of the East and he designed maps for a Description geographique de Ia Chine by Pere J. B. du Halde (1735), a notable work of the day based on surveys and reports of Jesuit missionaries. These maps were also issued in Nouvel Atlas de Ia Chine in 1737 and were the first to give a reasonably accurate picture of that remote land. From about 1740 onwards he published collections of maps under the title Atlas Generate which went through numerous expanding editions in various languages; English editions were printed by Robert Sayer, Laurie and Whittle, and others into the next century
Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d' Anville (1)
1758 D Anville Very Large Antique Map of Norway Sweden Iceland, Baltics & Russia
- Title : Seconde Partie de la Carte D Europe contenant Le Danemark et la Norwege, La Suede et la Russie....MDCCLVIII
- Size: 40 1/2in x 29 1/2in (1.02m x 760mm)
- Condition: (A) Very Good Condition
- Date : 1758
- Ref #: 92308
Description:
This scarce, very large (40in x 29in) highly detail map of Northern Europe Norway, Sweden, Lithuania, Baltic Countries and European Russia - was engraved in 1758 - dated in the title cartouche - by George De La Haye and was published by Jean Baptiste Bourguignon D\'Anville in his large elephant folio atlas Atlas Generale.
General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, Green, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 40 1/2in x 29 1/2in (1.02m x 760mm)
Plate size: - 40in x 28 1/2in (1.0m x 725mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)
Imperfections:
Margins: - Light toning
Plate area: - Folds as issued, light separation at corners of folds
Verso: - Age toning
Background:
Before the fifteenth century the people of Southern Europe had little geographical knowledge of the Scandinavian World except from sketchy detail shown in the Catalan Atlas (1375) and on a number of portolani embracing Denmark and the southern tip of Norway. It was not until 1427 that a manuscript map prepared about that time by Claudius Clavus (b.1388) a Dane who spent some time in Rome, made available to scholars a tolerable outline of the northern countries and Greenland. That was to remain the best map available for the rest of the century and it was used as the basis for maps of Scandinavia in early printed editions of Ptolemy. Others by Nicolaus Cusanus (1491) and Ehrhard Etzlaub (c. 1492) followed but, needless to say, these are extremely rare; even the later maps by Olaus Magnus and Marcus Jordan, where they have survived at all , are known only by a very few examples. In fact, apart from the rare appearance of an early Ptolemy map, the oldest of Scandinavia which a collector is likely to find are those of Munster\'s Cosmograhy first published in 1544. In the following centuries the few maps and charts complied in Scandinavia were usually published in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Paris or Nuremberg, the most important maps often being incorporated in the major Dutch, French & German Atlases. (Ref: Tooley; M&B)
