Dunn Terraqueous Globe World Map, 1787

The story of this map

Samuel Dunn was a mathematician and teacher of navigation in London, and this sheet, printed for Robert Sayer in 1787, is his attempt to put the whole of eighteenth-century science on one wall. The full title promises “the solar, starry and mundane system”, and it delivers: two big hemispheres of the Earth sit at the centre, and around them Dunn arranges the solar system, the phases and face of the moon, the northern and southern star charts and a rank of smaller diagrams explaining how it all fits together.

It was made for the age of Cook. The Pacific is filled in with the tracks and discoveries of recent voyages, and the hand colouring on the Leventhal copy gives the continents a clean, confident look. It is a map for people who liked to understand things, and it still rewards a slow read with a cup of coffee.

Because the sheet is almost square, it hangs differently from the long Dutch hemispheres: it makes a strong single statement over a fireplace, a sideboard or the head of a bed, and the square 20x20 and 24x24 sizes suit it especially well.

It belongs to our Antique World Maps collection and pairs naturally with the Cellarius celestial plates, which show the sky Dunn was still charting a century later. Each print is made to order on archival matte paper and framed in the country of delivery.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Restoration plan: crop scan margins, balance colour cast and levels while keeping the paper tone and hand colour, remove library stamps and scanner artefacts if present, gentle sharpening. No repainting of original content.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.