Carel Vosmaer

Carel Vosmaer (20 March 1826 – 12 June 1888) was a Dutch poet and art critic, born in The Hague. He wrote under the pseudonym Flanor.

Life

He studied law at the University of Leiden, obtaining a degree in 1851, and was for many years Deputy Recorder to the High Court of Justice in his native town, "an office he resigned in 1873, in order to devote himself wholly to art and letters."

His first volume of poems, 1860, did not contain much that was remarkable. It was not until after the sensational appearance of Multatuli (pen name of Edward Douwes-Dekker) that Vosmaer, at the age of forty, woke up to a consciousness of his own talent. In 1869 he produced an exhaustive monograph on Rembrandt, which was issued in French.

Vosmaer became a contributor to, and then the leading spirit and editor of, a journal which played an immense part in the awakening of Dutch literature; this was the Nederlandsche Spectator, in which a great many of his own works, in prose and verse, originally appeared. The remarkable miscellanies of Vosmaer, called Birds of Diverse Plumage, appeared in three volumes, in 1872, 1874 and 1876. In 1879 he selected from these all the pieces in verse, and added other poems to them. In 1881 he published an archaeological novel called Amazone, described as an "art-novel", the scene of which was laid in Naples and Rome, and which described the raptures of a Dutch antiquary in love. The sculptor Aktol, with his studio in the Baths of Diocletian, is based on Moses Jacob Ezekiel. It was translated into French, German, Belarusian, and an English translation was published in 1884.