Caspar Reuvens

Caspar Jacob Christiaan Reuvens (22 January 1793 – 26 July 1835) was a Dutch historian and archaeologist. He was the founding director of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (Dutch National Museum of Antiquities) in Leiden, the world's first ever professor of archaeology (at Leiden University), and conducted the first excavations at the Roman provincial site Forum Hadriani in the Netherlands.

In 1798, when Reuvens was only five years old, he lost his mother. His father was a prominent jurist, had been Minister of Justice for a short while, and filled various other important offices. Reuvens' father was transferred to Paris after the annexation of the Netherlands by France under Napoleon in 1810, so the young Reuvens lived there for some years. In 1813 Reuvens graduated from the University of Paris with a degree in law. During the reign of Napoleon, Paris received art from all the conquered nations and Reuvens studied with the famous antiquarian Vivant Denon, the director of the Louvre Museum. It has been argued that this experience in Paris would prove an inspiration for Reuvens' later efforts to establish a Dutch national museum for archaeology.

In 1814 Reuvens and his father returned to the Netherlands where they both found work as lawyers. Reuvens continued his childhood and teenage interest in the ancient world by studying and writing commentaries on Greek and Latin literature. These were published in 1815 under the title Collectanea litteraria.

In 1816 Reuvens became a professor in Harderwijk, and in 1818 at Leiden University (see below). Around this time Reuvens' father was killed in Brussels as a key witness in some sort of scandal. The details of the murder case remain unsolved.

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