In 1375, Cresques and his son Jehuda received an assignment from Prince John of Aragon, the future John I of Aragon, to make a set of nautical charts which would go beyond the normal geographic range of contemporary portolan charts to cover the East and the West, and everything that, from the Strait [of Gibraltar] leads to the West.

For this job, Cresques and Jehuda were paid 150 Aragonese golden florins, and 60 Mallorcan pounds, respectively, as it is stated in 14th-century documents from the Prince and his father Peter IV of Aragon.

In that year 1375 Cresques and Jehuda drew the six charts that composed the Catalan Atlas at their house in the Jewish quarter of Palma.

[2][3] Like the Catalan Atlas itself, these five maps (four portolan charts, one fragment of a mappa mundi), are unsigned and undated, and their date of composition estimated sometime between 1375 and 1400.

But it is hard to see, from the colour analysis alone, evidence to confirm that these four charts were the product of supervised work in a single atelier.