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J.-B. d'Anville as Armchair Mapmaker: The Impact of Production Contexts on His Work

The Palace of Versailles has a painting of an eighteenth-century French geographer (Fig. 1). The scholar is sitting on an upholstered chair at his desk engrossed in his reading. A globe and a few bound books seem to be the sole ornaments of his study. It is a mainly allegorical portrait, a typical representation of the armchair geographer (géographe de cabinet) at work surrounded by anonymous objects: the pages before him are covered with illegible marks, the surface of the globe is uniformly bland, the titles of the works on the bookshelves cannot be deciphered. The geographer’s activity is intellectual; he does not hold a pencil or any tool. The process of map making is made to look abstract, as if the drawing were being transferred magically from the mind to the page. Mapping, however, also involves physical activity, even if the geographer never leaves his office. The historian Nelson-Martin Dawson, in L’Atelier Delisle, was one of the first to remind us of the almost artisanal gestures that an eighteenth-century armchair geographer made as he jotted down his notes, outlined his drafts, copied and pasted papers, erased lines and re-inked the lines on his sheet. Yet these gestures should not be considered invariable, regardless of context. The way a scientist takes notes and draws his maps differs according to the circumstances at the start of each mapping project. The walls of an office do not preserve him from external pressures, and a geographer will not work in the same way with and without constraints. The influence of external constraints on the process of map making, commonly remarked on for land surveying, has rarely been considered in connection with the armchair geographer. However, just as land surveyors have had to adapt their way of measuring to accommodate the work force available, the particularities of the landscape and the attitude of local people, so too has the geographer had to adjust his way of working to fit the circumstances. Three initiating contexts can be identified according to the way each map-making project came into being. One was ‘personal’, when the main instigator was the geographer himself. The second was ‘editorial’, when he was commissioned by an author or a publisher to produce a map. The third was ‘official’ or ‘political’; in this case, the map order came from the government, a regional or local administration, or an authority responsible for trade and commerce. My aim here is to focus on the way each context affected the preparation of the map in question, from information-gathering to printing. Jean-Baptiste d’Anville (1697–1782) was just such an armchair geographer. The maps he made