Arnout Vosmaer

Arnout Vosmaer (born October 23, 1720 in Rotterdam , † January 15, 1799 in The Hague ), sometimes also written Aernout Vosmaer , was a Dutch naturalist and collection curator.

Live and act

After the early death of his father, a wine merchant, Vosmaer worked in the grain distribution of a brewery and in a sugar refinery. During this period he began to build up his natural history cabinet. In 1751 he moved to The Hague, where he got a job in the government's financial administration. He continued to enlarge his cabinet, which subsequently became one of the most famous in Holland. A year later he acquired exhibits from the Amsterdam pharmacist Albertus Seba , author of the Thesaurus , a four-volume illustrated atlas on plants and animals.

Vosmaer's exhibits quickly caught the attention of Princess Anne (1709–1759), which led to the Dutch crown purchasing the collections and Vosmaer being appointed director of the governor's cabinet. He enlarged the collection through direct purchases from dealers, through donations from the royal family or through auctions from other natural history collections. After Anne's death in 1759, Vosmaer continued his work in the service of her son, Stadtholder Wilhelm V , who in 1771 appointed him director of his menagerie. In this capacity, Vosmaer was the first to keep a live Bornean orangutan in Europe between June 1776 and January 1777 . Even today extinct species, including a quagga and a Mauritius fruit pigeon , lived in the menagerie for some time. The deceased animals of the menagerie were prepared and taken into the governor's cabinet.

In 1786 Wilhelm V left The Hague for political reasons and moved to the ancestral seat in Apeldoorn . He sold his country estate at Het Kleine Loo. The animals were taken to a menagerie near Apeldoorn. Vosmaer remained in The Hague with the governor's cabinet.

Vosmaer was a fanatical collector and the governor's cabinet eventually gained a reputation as Holland's national natural history museum. It was opened to visitors and Vosmaer personally presented the premises to them when he was present. Some naturalists, including Peter Simon Pallas , were given the opportunity to study the exhibits unsupervised. The importance of the collection also attracted visitors from distant countries. The English zoologist Thomas Pennant visited the cabinet in 1756 and described Vosmaer as “Frenchified Dutchman, extremely ignorant. German: Frenchized Dutch, extremely ignorant. ”Others believed that Vosmaer was abusing his position of influence to attack those who were more knowledgeable than he was. Vosmaer represented a class of Dutch collectors who were mainly interested in collecting and exhibiting their treasures, in contrast to Albertus Seba and the Amsterdam naturalist Martinus Houttuyn , who produced illustrated scientific works based on their collections.

Vosmaer was also active as an editor. In 1754 he published the second edition of Louis Renard's natural history of marine fish and crustaceans of the Dutch East Indies from 1719. In 1758 and 1765 he published volumes three and four of the Thesaurus by Albertus Seba. He used Seba's notes and was helped on this project by Houtthuyn, Pallas, and other naturalists. In 1804 the posthumous work Natuurkundige beschryving eener uitmuntende verzameling van zeldsaame gedierten, bestaande in Oost- en Westindische viervoetige dieren, vogelen en slangen, weleer leevend voorhanden geweest zynde, buiten den Haag, op het Kleine Loo van ZDH den prins , a collection of 33 individual titles and dated sections describing animals from the governor's menagerie.

In 1795 the governor's cabinet was dissolved when Napoleon Bonaparte ordered his army to support revolutionaries in the Netherlands and later set up a puppet government there under the rule of his brother Louis Bonaparte . The Muséum d'histoire naturelle founded a special commission of professors with the task of confiscating Wilhelm V's natural history cabinet and menagerie and transporting them to Paris. However, the French overlooked the exhibits stored in the cellars, including some from Seba. When the Netherlands regained their independence in 1813, they reclaimed the stolen exhibits. However, the professors of the Muséum d'histoire naturelle were not prepared to forego the originals and therefore sent some duplicates back to the Netherlands.

When Wilhelm V fled to England in 1795, Vosmaer's leadership of the governor's cabinet was also ended.

Honors

From 1758 he was a corresponding member of the Académie royale des sciences . In 1763 he was elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina .

Dedication names

The extinct giant tortoise Cylindraspis vosmaeri from the Mascarene island of Rodrigues , the skinkart Lygosoma vosmaeri and Eclectus roratus vosmaeri , a subspecies of the edible parrot , are named after Vosmaer .

literature

• LC Rookmaaker: The Zoological Exploration of Southern Africa, 1650-1790 AA Balkema Publishers, 1989. ISBN 978-9061918677 .
• Andreas Grote (Hrsg.): Macrocosmos in Microcosmo: The world in the room on the history of collecting 1450 to 1800. Berlin writings on museum studies. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, 1994. ISBN 978-3-663-10699-9 .
• Kraig Adler (Ed.): Contributions to the History of Herpetology , Volume 3, Contributions to Herpetology Volume 29, Society for the study of amphibians and reptiles, 2012. ISBN 978-0-916984-82-3 . Pp. 33-34.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Thomas Pennant: Journal of a Tour on the Continent , 1765
2. ^ List of former members since 1666: Letter V. Académie des sciences, accessed on March 13, 2020 (French). 
3. ^ Member entry by Arnout Vosmaer at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on June 18, 2016.