Theatre de la Guerre dans les pays-bas, ou se trouvent...

War Map of present-day Belgium.

The Robert de Vaugondy family of mapmakers were preeminent in the eighteenth century, at a time when the French were at the forefront of cartography. Gilles Robert de Vaugondy was a descendent of the family of the great seventeenth-century French cartographer Nicolas Sanson. Sanson had initiated the so-called "French school of cartography," which was unprecedented in its attention to precision and scientific detail, and which discarded much of the decorative embellishments of previous maps as being irrelevant. From Sanson's time in the second half of the seventeenth century until the latter part of the eighteenth century, with the activity of the Robert de Vaugondy family, French geographical conceptions were more influential than those of any other nation.

Gilles Robert de Vaugondy inherited the firm of his uncle, Pierre Moullart-Sanson, in 1730. He enlarged the stock of his family company when he purchased the estate of another acclaimed cartographer, Hubert Jaillot. He and other family members combined much of the inherited cartographic material with their own innovations, as well as those of the most advanced American mapmakers, to publish a series of beautifully produced atlases at mid-century.
Gilles and his son, Didier, were the most celebrated members of the cartography dynasty, both honored with the title of Geographer to the King, Gilles in 1730 and Didier in 1760.