Robert de Vaugondy

Published 1749, Paris

Size: 6.5" X 6.5"

Description:

A rare and beautiful map of Hudson Bay, Baffin Island, Greenland, and Labrador.  The area depicted was of interest to Europeans because of the possibility of that it offered of a Northwest Passage to the Atlantic.  Although Vaugondy’s depiction links Greenland to Baffin Island, explorers would continue to focus their energies in the year’s to come on finding a river system near the Western and Southern reaches of Hudson’s Bay.

This map was originally issued in Robert de Vaugondy’s Atlas Portatif Unviversel et Militaire.

Robert de Vaugondy and other members of this illustrious family of mapmakers were one of the preeminent cartography firms of the eighteenth century.  The Vaugondy’s were in fact descendent of another family of great seventeenth-century French cartographers, that of Nicolas Sanson. Sanson is argued to have began the "French school of cartography," with its greater attention to scientific detail in lieu of superfluous decorations and  embellishments.  The Vaugondy’s are deemed to have started leaving their mark on cartography when Gilles Robert de Vaugondy inherited the firm from his uncle, Pierre Moullart-Sanson, in 1730 and then shortly thereafter purchased the estate of Hubert Jaillot, another important cartographer associated with the French school of cartography.