Gilles Robert de Vaugondy (1688-1766) French, 1756 Map of Africa. Titled "L'Afrique dressée, sur les relations le plus recentes, et assujettie aux observations astronomiques." Cartouche illustrates a native woman reclining between two palms alongside a lion. The interior of southern Africa is fairly blank other than tribal names, and the Prime Meridian runs obscurely outside the continent. 

Condition: Commensurate with age. Damage to sides and edges. 

Size: 20 1/2 x 25 1/2 in. 

#4485  

Gilles Robert de Vaugondy was born in 1688 in Paris. By the time his son Didier was born in 1723 he was already known as one of the leading French cartographers of his day, and Didier soon followed in his footsteps. The Robert de Vaugondys were descended from the Nicolas Sanson family through Sanson’s grandson, Pierre Moulard-Sanson. From him they inherited much of Sanson’s cartographic material, which they combined with maps and plates acquired after Hubert Jaillot’s death in 1712. Sources from the Dépôt de la Marine, the official French repository for maritime-related information, were used for their maps of Canada and South America. In 1757 Gilles and Didier published The Atlas Universel, one of the most thorough and important atlases of the 18th Century. The Vaugondys integrated hundreds of older sources with more modern surveyed maps, verifying and correcting the latitude and longitude of many regional views in the atlas with astronomical observations and updating new place names. In 1760 Didier was appointed royal geographer to Louis XV, and the following year he was made the head geographer of the Duke of Lorraine by Stanisław Leszczyński, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. After the death of his father in 1766, he began making globes of a variety of sizes, gluing copperplate-printed gores on a plaster-finished papier-mache core, a complicated and expensive manufacturing process that required employing several specialists. Due to their similarities both in name and composition, it can be difficult to determine which specific maps or even sections of a map were done by either father or son. Gilles often signed maps as “M. Robert,” while Didier commonly signed his maps as “Robert de Vaugondy,” or added “fils” or “filio” after his name. Like Ortelius and Mercator, both Gilles and Didier credited their sources rather than insinuating them to be solely their own, which has greatly benefited the study of the history of cartography during that period. In 1773 Didier became royal censor for French works related to geography, navigation and travels, and he passed away in 1786, mourned by several royal courts for his and his father’s contributions to exploration and cartography throughout their lifetimes.

Commensurate with age. Damage to sides and edges.