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Description

Detailed 2 sheet map of the British and Spanish colonies in North America, which appeared in Lattre's Atlas Moderne, published in Paris.

The map extends north to Baffin's Bay and west to Lake Ouinipigon (Winnepeg), the known course of the Missouri River and Texas, providing a nice image of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley on the eve of the American Revolution.

The various lines denote the boundaries of Canada, Mexique (New Spain), the lands of the Hudson's Bay Company and Louisiana. Curiously, no line is shown differentiating Canada from the remaining British Colonies. The boundaries of the British Colonies and East and West Florida are not shown.

Rigobert Bonne Biography

Rigobert Bonne (1727-1794) was an influential French cartographer of the late-eighteenth century. Born in the Lorraine region of France, Bonne came to Paris to study and practice cartography. He was a skilled cartographer and hydrographer and succeeded Jacques Nicolas Bellin as Royal Hydrographer at the Depot de la Marine in 1773. He published many charts for the Depot, including some of those for the Atlas Maritime of 1762. In addition to his work at the Depot, he is  best known for his work on the maps of the Atlas Encyclopedique (1788) which he did with Nicholas Desmarest. He also made the maps for the Abbe Raynals’ famous Atlas de Toutes Les Parties Connues du Globe Terrestre (1780).

More than his individual works, Bonne is also important for the history of cartography because of the larger trends exemplified by his work. In Bonne’s maps, it is possible to see the decisive shift from the elaborate decorations of the seventeenth century and the less ornate, yet still prominent embellishments of the early to mid-eighteenth century. By contrast, Bonne’s work was simple, unadorned, and practical. This aesthetic shift, and the detail and precision of his geography, make Bonne an important figure in mapping history.