Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan

General Map of the Wild Fields, in common speech Ukraine, with adjacent Provinces, Beauplan. South is up. Guillaume Levasseur de Beauplan ( – 6 December 1673) or William le Vasseur de Beauplan was a French-Polish cartographer, engineer and architect.

Beauplan is best known for his 1648 General Map of Ukraine and other maps of Ukraine (which he spelt as Ukranie or Vkranie, with the "U" spelt as a "V"), and his 1660 book Description d'Ukranie ("Description of Ukraine"), first published in 1651 as Description des contrés du Royaume de Pologne ("Description of the Kingdom of Poland's Lands"), which was republished and translated many times in Western European languages throughout the rest of the 17th century and the entire 18th century.

Career Beauplan's 1639 hand-drawn Tabula Geographica Ukrainska became the basis of his 1648 General Map of Ukraine. Beauplan served as artillery captain for the army of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland between 1630 and 1647 or 1648.

General Map of Ukraine

In 1639, Beauplan created the first "descriptive" map of Ukraine. Antonovich: Kiev 1896 (Russian) Liaskoronskii: Kiev 1901 (Russian) Petryshyn: New York 1959 (English) Blaeu: Amsterdam 1967 (French) Wójcik: Warsaw 1972 (Polish) Isaievych: Lviv 1981 (Ukrainian)