Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
Christoph Janneck (1707-1761) in Austria, James Northcote (1746-1831)
in England, Carl Spitzweg (1802-1885) in Germany, William Fettes
Douglas (1822-1891) in Scotland, and Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-
1945) in the USA, but only few artists made original modifications ( e.g.
Figures 6a/b).
Once established as a symbol of quackery and fraud this motif was
used for all kinds of satire. For example, Figure 7a shows a political sat-
ire by Temple West (c. 1739-1783) mocking King George III's mis-
judgement of Napoleon by depicting 'the little emperor' as a small figure
in a large glass retort. Throughout the nineteenth century, images based
on this motif frequently included such nationalistic overtones, but the
primary satirical attacks continued to be aimed at medicine (Figures
7b/c).
2.5 Portraits of nineteenth-century chemists and their twentieth-
century transformation
In general the image of a man holding up and gazing at a flask - the
archetypical pose of twentieth-century chemists - was carefully avoided
by nineteenth-century chemists. Nobody wanted to be portrayed as an
imposter or swindler. Based on our analysis of hundreds of painted and
photographed portraits in various collections, nineteenth-century chem-
ists preferred four types of portraits: 11 (1) Most chemists, particularly in
the German and English traditions, are depicted sitting on a chair with
some glassware or chemical apparatus in the background and books or
notes in the foreground (Figure 8a). (2) In some portraits the only acces-
sories are books, indicating the scientist's strong theoretical orientation
(Figure 8b). (3) A third group of particularly English chemists are
presented with their inventions, which suggests their ambition for tech-
nological applications of chemistry (Figure 8c). (4) Finally, a fourth
11
Useful internet image sources include the Science & Society Picture Library and the
Ingenious database at the Science Museum London <http://www.scienceandsociety.
co.uk> <http://www.ingenious.org.uk/>, the Smith Collection at the University of
Pennsylvania <http://dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/smith/>, the Wellcome Library
<http://medphoto.wellcome.ac.uk>, Wikipedia Commons <http://commons.wiki-
media.org>, and Google Images <http://images.google. com>.
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