The Life of Governor Joan Gideon Loten (1710 - 1789). A Personal History of a Dutch Virtuoso. 2010. 32 col. plates. Many b/w figs. 829 p. gr8vo. Hardcover.

The book details the personal history of Joan Gideon Loten, thenaturalist Governor of Ceylon, and his professional career as a servantof the Dutch East Indies Company. It contains an inventory of hisnatural history drawings in the London Natural History Museum and Teylers Museum at Haarlem, to this day a valuable treasure of eighteenthcentury natural history of Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Loten's documentsshow us a virtuoso: a connoisseur and dilettante in natural philosophy.They give us a unique glimpse of his character and qualities, but alsoof his asthmatic sufferings and use of opium. Loten's writingsquoted extensively in this biography, take us from the early-eighteenthcentury narrow minded, provincial Utrecht in the Dutch Republic tothe exotic Dutch East Indies and from there to the cosmopolitanLondon of the latter part of the century.