Background
Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville was born on the 11th of July 1697 in Paris. He was the son of Hubert Bourguignon and Charlotte Vaugon.
Atlas curieux Paris by Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville.
D'Anville's map of China and Central Asia (1734) for du Halde's "Description geographique de la Chine", compiled based on the first systematic geographic survey of the entire Chinese Empire by a team of French Jesuits (c. 1700).
Stretched Canvas Print: Asia I, c.1751 by Jean Baptiste Bourguignon Anville.
A Map of South America, Robert Sayer, D'Anville, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon (1697-1782) Published: Sept. 20, 1775. London). Dramatic two-sheet wall map of the continent with an extremely large title cartouche depicting an Indian viewing a distant landscape across a river.
Compendium of ancient geography. Part II. (1791) Authored by Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (1697-1782).
Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville was born on the 11th of July 1697 in Paris. He was the son of Hubert Bourguignon and Charlotte Vaugon.
D'Anville`s passion for geographical research displayed itself from early years: at the age of twelve he was already amusing himself by drawing maps for Latin authors. Later, his friendship with the antiquarian, Abbe Longuerue, greatly aided his studies.
D’Anville was secretary to the duke of Orléans (regent during the minority of Louis XV) and was named royal geographer as early as 1717. Having been elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1754, he succeeded Buache as chief royal geographer in 1773 and as assistant geographer to the Académie Royale des Sciences.
D’Anville made studies of ancient measurements in several memoirs and in his Traité des mesures itinéraires anciennes et modernes (1769). Comparing them with modem figures, he established remarkably accurate maps for Rollin’s Histoire ancienne, Rollin and Crevier’s Histoire romaine, and the Histoire des empereurs romains. His maps were greatly appreciated by geographers and navigators, and their exactness was confirmed for Italy by the geodesic operations carried out under the pontificate of Benedict XIV, and for Egypt during Napoleon’s campaign in 1799. D’Anville was less successful in his studies of the figure of the earth, and his two memoirs on that subject (1735, 1736) contain some erroneous conclusions.
In 1780 d’Anville gave the king his remarkable collection of 10,000 maps, which were both engraved and in manuscript. This collection is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale. In spite of delicate health d’Anville lived until his eighty-fifth year, having devoted his life almost wholly to his work and having published, besides his maps, numerous articles on geography and cartography.
He died on January 28, 1782 in Paris, France.
In 1754, at the age of fifty-seven, D'Anville became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, whose transactions he enriched with many papers.
About 1730 D’Anville married Charlotte Testard, who bore him two daughters.