Claës Fredrik Hornstedt
Swedish botanical illustrator (1758-1809)
Claës Fredrik Hornstedt (12 February 1758 Linköping – May 1809 Helsinki) was a Swedish naturalist, taxonomist, botanical illustrator and a protégé of Carl Peter Thunberg.
Hornstedt received a thorough education in natural history at the University of Uppsala. His 1781 dissertation dealt with plants collected in Japan by his teacher and mentor, Thunberg. At the invitation of Thunberg he set off in 1783 for Batavia, capital of the Dutch colonial empire, from Göteborg, boarding the “Sophia Magdalena”, a ship belonging to the Swedish East India Company. Supported by the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences, he began collecting natural history specimens, mounted expeditions to the interior and neighbouring islands, and learnt the Malay language and Mandarin. His letters show a growing disaffection with the European way of life and its prodigality. He wore Chinese clothing, ate Chinese food and frequented the Chinese quarter.
Hornstedt left Java in August 1784, suffering the after-effects of malaria and jaundice, but even so managed to return with an impressive collection of natural history and ethnological objects. His collection also contained a set of medical drawings based on a Japanese medical text. These drawings were given to him by Isaac Titsingh who had come back to Batavia after his second trip to the East India Company's Station at Dejima.
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This entry incorporates text from “Claës Fredrik Hornstedt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.