Joan Gideon Loten

Joan Gideon Loten, born at Maartensdijk in 1710 and in the Company’s service at Batavia from 1731, governed first at Macassar and then Ceylon from 1752 to 1757, holding the island through the middle years of the century. He is remembered as the naturalist governor and a founding figure of its ornithology, an amateur painter who kept artists in his service to set down its plants, animals and landscapes; chief among them was the young Ceylonese draughtsman Pieter de Bevere, whose watercolours he directed and carried home. Through that patronage the finest natural-history painting of Dutch Ceylon was made.

Settling in England, Loten was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1760, his standing as a collector confirmed. His holdings were later dispersed, the topographical views passing mostly to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the natural-history drawings largely to the British Museum, so that the record he gathered survives divided between two great collections. He died at Utrecht in 1789, having done more by directing others than by his own hand.