Vandermaelen map: Carte topographique de la Belgique à l’échelle de 1 à 20.000, 1846-1854

Philippe Vandermaelen (1795-1869) was born at the end of the 18th century in Brussels into a wealthy family. Already in his childhood he took a great interest in cartography and he formed himself as an autodidact. He began his career with a work of monumental size: an Atlas universel, which he published between 1825 and 1827 in forty episodes of ten folios each. This work is exceptional in two respects: it is the first world atlas, on a single scale, of which a giant globe with a diameter of 7.55 meters can be made; In addition, it is the first atlas to be created using a printing technique that artists highly value but with which scientists were not yet familiar: the lithography. It wasn't long before Philippe Vandermaelen enjoyed international fame. Immediately after that, he set up an Atlas de l’Europe in 165 folios. In 1830, Vandermaelen set up the Etablissement géographique de Bruxelles at the gates of the city. When Belgium became independent, the cartographer adapted his production. In just a few months, he produced the first magazines of a Carte de la Belgique d’après Ferraris in 42 folios. In parallel, he led a large-scale information-gathering campaign that enabled him to start publishing the Dictionnaires géographiques spéciaux des provinces de la Belgique in 1831. Very quickly Vandermaelen became the Belgian cartographer par excellence. In 1831 he was commissioned by the government to draw up a Carte des frontières on the basis of which the negotiations between Belgium and Holland would be conducted. It was the beginning of a long collaboration between the government and this private entrepreneur. Vandermaelen was commissioned to map the roads, canals, railways and the telegraph after the borders, and then also the mines and factories, the general water level, the subsurface of Belgium and the expansion of Brussels. He took advantage of his privileged relations with the government to get his hands on the handwritten plans of the municipal land registers. He also acquired the existing triangular measurements. He sent his topographers to the nine provinces to make the necessary measurements and published two Cartes topographiques de la Belgique: the 1:80 000 scale map in 25 folios – a masterpiece of lithography – was fully completed in 1853, while the 250 folios of the 1:20 000 scale map appeared between 1846 and 1854, long before the War Depot map, the first folios of which rolled off the presses only in 1865. When the Etablissement géographique de Bruxelles closed its doors for good in 1880, the Royal Library of Belgium acquired the lion's share of the immense production (Source: KBR).The digital accessibility of Vandermaelen's topographic map on a scale of 1:20,000 was achieved through a collaboration in 2009 between KBR and the then AGIV (Agency for Geographic Information Flanders), now Digital Flanders. The maps were digitised, georeferenced and made available via geopunt.be, the geoportal of GDI-Vlaanderen. The intellectual property rights of the georeferenced maps have been shared and rest with KBR and Digitaal Vlaanderen.