A minister with a licence to shoot
In the 1750s a Remonstrant minister in Haarlem held a permit that few of his colleagues would have wanted: he could shoot birds all year round, close season or not. Cornelius Nozeman needed the birds for his work. He described them, had them drawn, and in 1770 the first volume of Nederlandsche Vogelen appeared, the first comprehensive book on the birds of the Netherlands.
Nozeman (1720 to 1786) was a preacher by profession and a naturalist by inclination, like many educated men of his century. He wrote the text of the first two volumes of the book that bears his name; the plates were drawn and engraved by Christiaan Sepp and published by Sepp's son. What the book is is told separately; this is the man.
Alkmaar, Haarlem, Rotterdam
He was born in Amsterdam in 1720, the son of the composer and violinist Jacobus Nozeman, and trained as a minister. His first post was Alkmaar, from 1744 to 1749, where he began doing experiments in his spare time and read his way into natural history and what was then called experimental philosophy.
In 1749 he moved to Haarlem. There he supported the founding of the Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen, the Dutch Society of Sciences, the oldest learned society in the country, and built up a large collection of butterflies, partly for himself and partly for the natural history cabinet of the widow of Prince William IV. That work brought him the licence to shoot.
In 1759 he was called to Rotterdam, where he was a co-founder and chairman of the Bataafsch Genootschap der Proefondervindelijke Wijsbegeerte, the Batavian Society for Experimental Philosophy. A fall left him partly disabled and he was released from some of his duties. He spent his last years in Moordrecht, a village on the Hollandse IJssel, for his health, and died there in 1786.
Butterflies, bird names and a horsetail
Nozeman published more than the bird book. He edited and translated into Dutch the list of bird genera by the German naturalist P. H. G. Moehring, and he translated a selection of papers from the learned societies of Europe for Dutch readers. For the Society for the Promotion of Agriculture he wrote a treatise on Equisetum, the horsetail, in which his observations and descriptions were far more exact than those of the botanists of his day.
Nederlandsche Vogelen
The idea of a complete, life-size, coloured account of the birds of the Netherlands was Nozeman's. He found his partners in Amsterdam: Christiaan Sepp, an engraver and naturalist, who drew the birds and cut the copper plates, and Sepp's son Jan Christiaan Sepp (1739 to 1811), a bookseller and publisher with the same interests, who issued the work in parts from 1770.
The plan was five volumes of fifty plates each. Nozeman wrote the descriptions for the first volume (1770) and most of the second, and then died in 1786, three years before the second volume came out. Christiaan Sepp had died in 1775. The book was finished without them, by Martinus Houttuyn, by Jan Christiaan Sepp and finally by his son Jan Sepp with Coenraad Jacob Temminck, and the fifth volume appeared in 1829, nearly sixty years after the first.
Nozeman's birds today
Our 133 Nozeman prints come from volumes 1 to 3, photographed from the copy in the library of the Teylers Museum in Haarlem and printed for us by Re-Art Special Art Productions in Almere, at the size of the original plate, in an edition of 250, numbered in pencil and with a certificate. Browse them on Nederlandsche Vogelen or start with the artist page.
Four plates to start with
Questions
Who was Cornelius Nozeman?
A Dutch Remonstrant minister (1720 to 1786) and naturalist who served in Alkmaar, Haarlem and Rotterdam and began Nederlandsche Vogelen, the first comprehensive book of the birds of the Netherlands, writing the text of its first two volumes.
Did Nozeman draw the plates of Nederlandsche Vogelen?
No. The plates were drawn and engraved by Christiaan Sepp, and after his death in 1775 by his son Jan Christiaan Sepp and grandson Jan Sepp. Nozeman wrote the descriptions.
Is it Cornelius or Cornelis Nozeman?
Both spellings are used. The book's title page has Cornelius, and so do we.