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.

Click here to see maps published by d'Anville.

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