Karol Perthées or Karol Herman de Perthées (14 January 1740 – 21 November 1815 / 2 December 1815) was a Polish-Lithuanian army engineer who served as royal cartographer under the patronage of

Stanisław August Poniatowski Stanisław II August (born Stanisław Antoni Poniatowski; 17 January 1732 – 12 February 1798), known also by his regnal Latin name Stanislaus II Augustus, was King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1764 to 1795, and the last monarch ...

. He worked on maps of the region, collected insects, and lectured on cartography for the Russian army in Vilnius. His most famous map, ''Polonia secundum legitimas proiectionis stereographicae regulas,'' was destroyed in 1944 by a fire but reconstructions exist.

Life and work

Perthées was born in

Dresden Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label=Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth larg ...

in a family of French Huguenots, the illegitimate son of

Herman Karl von Keyserling Count Hermann Karl von Keyserling (1697–1764) was a Russian diplomat from the Keyserlingk family of Baltic German nobility based in the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia. Life In 1733, the nobility of Courland sent Keyserling to Saint Peter ...

. Although he was given the name Herman as well as Karol, he used only Karol. He studied at military school in Berlin and trained in military engineering. In 1764 he was appointed court geographer and map-maker to

, colonel of the Polish royal army. In 1798 he lectured on cartography for the Russian army in Vilnius. He produced a series of 1: 225,000 scale maps of the provinces of the former

Republic of Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populous ...

, with five of them published in Paris, along with a hydrographic map of Poland (''Carte hydrographique de Pologne'') in 1809. From 1810 his eyesight deteriorated and in 1812 he moved to Mazuryszki near Vilnius. Apart from cartography, he collected insects and although much of it is destroyed, some illustrated descriptions survived. His collections included 2600 species and was acquired after his death by Vilnius University in 1823 but it was destroyed in 1943 during World War II. Perthées married Józefa daughter of Italian painter Bernardo Bellotto and after her death in 1789, he married her sister Teresa in 1792. He was ennobled in 1768 and was buried in Vilnius (in the city's Protestant Cemetery) but the tomb no longer survives.

References

External links

Karol Perthées by Henryk Rutkowski
{{DEFAULTSORT:de Perthees, Karol 1740 births 1815 deaths People from Dresden People from the Electorate of Saxony German cartographers German geographers Engineers from the Holy Roman Empire Emigrants from the Holy Roman Empire Immigrants to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth