Emanuel Bowen

Emanuel Bowen (1694?–1767) was an English map engraver, who worked for George II of England and Louis XV of France as a geographer.

An 18th-century map and print seller, who worked in London from about 1714, producing some of the best and attractive maps of the century. A recurring feature of Bowen's work, evident even on the early road maps, was his habit of filling every corner and space of the map with jottings and footnotes, both historical and topographical.

One of his earliest engraved works, Britannia Depicta, published in 1720, contained over two hundred road maps together with a miniature county map of each of the counties of England and Wales. It was an unusual feature of the atlas that the maps were engraved on both sides of each page, and this resulted in a handier-sized book.

He also issued with John Owen a book of road maps based, as was usual at the time, on John Ogilby but again incorporating his own style of historical and heraldic detail.

In spite of his royal appointments and apparent prosperity he died in poverty and his son, who carried on the business, was no more fortunate and died in a Clerkenwell workhouse in 1790.

He published "A Complete System of Geography, 1744-7; an 'English Atlas, with a new set of maps,' 1745(?); a 'Complete Atlas ... in sixty-eight Maps,' 1752; 'Atlas Minimus; or a new set of Pocket Maps,' 1758; and a series of separate maps of the English counties, of Germany, Asia Minor, and Persia, between 1736 and 1776.

Thomas Bowen was his son;Thomas Kitchin and Thomas Jefferys were his apprentices.

Bowen's map, A Complete Map of the Southern Continent survey'd by Capt. Abel Tasman & depicted by order of the East India Company in Holland in the Stadt House at Amsterdam, was essentially a copy of the map Melchisédech Thévenot had published in Relations de divers Voyages curieux (Paris, 1663, v.1). Although Thévenot said that he had taken his chart from the one inlaid into the floor of the Amsterdam Town Hall, it appears to be an almost exact copy of that of Joan Blaeu in his Archipelagus Orientalis sive Asiaticus published in 1659 in the Kurfürsten Atlas (Atlas of the Great Elector). The map of the world set into the floor of the great hall of the Amsterdam Town Hall was drawn from Blaeu's world map of 1648. Once Blaeu's map of the world appeared other mapmakers, such as Thévenot, copied his depiction of New Holland. Hollandia Nova in the Kurfürsten Atlas is shown as it appears in Blaeu's world map of 1648. It appears to have been Thévenot who introduced a differentiation between Hollandia Nova to the west and Terre Australe to the east of the meridian corresponding to 135° East of Greenwich, emphasised by the latitude staff running down that meridian, as there is no such division on Blaeu's map.

...
Wikipedia