The Life of Governor Joan Gideon Loten 1710-1789
- Auteur Alexander J.P. Raat
- Éditeur Uitgeverij Maklu NV
- ISBN 9789087041519
- Date de publication 01-05-2010
- Pays Belgium
- Langue Dutch
- Disponibilité En stock
- Livraison gratuite
Description
The Life of Joan Gideon Loten, the 39;naturalist Governor of Ceylon39;, details his personal history and his professional career as a servant of the Dutch East Indies Company. It contains an inventory of his natural history drawings in the London Natural History Museum and Teylers Museum at Haarlem to this day a valuable treasure of eighteenth-century natural history of Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Lotens documents show us a virtuoso a connoisseur and dilettante in natural philosophy. They give us a unique glimpse of his character and qualities, but also of his asthmatic sufferings and use of opium. Lotens writings, quoted extensively in this biography, take us from the early-eighteenth-century narrow-minded, provincial Utrecht in the Dutch Republic to the exotic Dutch East Indies and from there to the cosmopolitan London of the latter part of the century.