Background:
D Anvilles maps have a clarity and a directness that is very modern. He incorporated as much known information into his maps as he could. Map extent is from Cap Blanc in the north to Cap de Verga in the south.
Being part of the Mediterranean world, the northern coasts of the African continent as far as the Straits of Gibraltar and even round to the area of the Fortunate Isles (the Canaries) were reasonably well known and quite accurately mapped from ancient times. In particular, Egypt and the Nile Valley were well defined and the Nile itself was, of course, one of the rivers separating the continents in medieval T-O maps. Through Arab traders the shape of the east coast, down the Red Sea as far as the equator, was also known but detail shown in the interior faded into deserts with occasional mountain ranges and mythical rivers. The southern part of the continent, in the Ptolemaic tradition, was assumed to curve to the east to form a land-locked Indian Ocean. The voyages of the Portuguese, organized by Henry the Navigator in the fifteenth century, completely changed the picture and by the end of the century Vasco da Gama had rounded the Cape enabling cartographers to draw a quite presentable coastal outline of the whole continent, even if the interior was to remain largely unknown for the next two or three centuries.
The first separately printed map of Africa (as with the other known continents) appeared in Munsters Geographia from 1540 onwards and the first atlas devoted to Africa only was published in 1588 in Venice by Livio Sanuto, but the finest individual map of the century was that engraved on 8 sheets by Gastaldi, published in Venice in 1564. Apart from maps in sixteenth-century atlases generally there were also magnificent marine maps of 1596 by Jan van Linschoten (engraved by van Langrens) of the southern half of the continent with highly imaginative and decorative detail in the interior. In the next century there were many attractive maps including those of Mercator/Hondius (1606), Speed (1627), Blaeu (1 630), Visscher (1636), de Wit (c. 1670), all embellished with vignettes of harbours and principal towns and bordered with elaborate and colourful figures of their inhabitants, but the interior remained uncharted with the exception of that part of the continent known as Ethiopia, the name which was applied to a wide area including present-day Abyssinia. Here the legends of Prester John lingered on and, as so often happened in other remote parts of the world, the only certain knowledge of the region was provided by Jesuit missionaries. Among these was Father Geronimo Lobo (1595-1678), whose work A Voyage to Abyssinia was used as the basis for a remarkably accurate map published by a German scholar, Hiob Ludolf in 1683. Despite the formidable problems which faced them, the French cartographers G. Delisle (c. 1700-22), J. B. B. dAnville (1727-49) and N. Bellin (1754) greatly improved the standards of mapping of the continent, improvements which were usually, although not always, maintained by Homann, Seutter, de Ia Rochette, Bowen, Faden and many others in the later years of the century. (Ref: Tooley, M&B)

D Anville, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon 1697-1782
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.

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