ABSTRACT
The three great projects on which Caspar Jacob Christiaan Reuvens was working, the publication of the Borgia papers cum annexis, the description of the Egyptian antiquities, and the topography of the Netherlands in Roman times, were suddenly thwarted by his death in July 1835. This tragic event was to transform the future of the National Museum of Antiquities. On 13 July 1835 Reuvens and his wife Louise arrived in London by steamer and spent a few days in the capital. With the opening of the museum to the public, the appointment of Leemans as director and the start of publication of the catalogues, which continued to be published throughout the nineteenth century, a new chapter opened in the history of the National Museum of Antiquities: a period of consolidation after the restless pioneer years, in which archaeology and the Museum of Antiquities had had to struggle for their existence in the difficult cultural climate of the early nineteenth century.
