Chemistry Reference
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group, consisting particularly of French chemists, are depicted working
in the laboratory, and it is only here that some slight association with the
quack/imposture motif sometimes appears (Figure 8d).
How then did this pose become so popular among twentieth-century
chemists? We suspect that commercial artists and photographers,
whether consciously or not, gradually manoeuvred chemists into that
pose and that chemists were increasingly uninformed about its negative
symbolism. Eventually, without a clear understanding of its cultural and
historical implications, they unwittingly embraced as the icon of their
professional identity a symbol of imposture and fraud that had been
firmly established for centuries.
To support our thesis we analyze three series of portraits of eminent
nineteenth-century chemists in which the classical uroscopy/imposture
motif gradually moves from satirical caricature to serious portraiture.
Figure 9a shows John Dalton (1766-1844) in typical portrait type 1,
i.e.
with some chemical apparatus in the background and books or notes
(here, his atomic formulae) in the foreground. This painting by Joseph
Allen (1770-1839) was definitely made during Dalton's life and certainly
with his agreement. In contrast, Figure 9b shows a later caricature (prob-
ably from 1882) by James Stephenson (1808-1886) of Dalton as Presi-
dent of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, which il-
lustrates that the uroscopy/imposter motif was deliberately applied to
chemists in nineteenth-century satire. Although the vessel he gazes at is
somewhat unusual, it is clearly a version of the uroscopy/imposter motif.
Because Dalton was famously color blind - he published the first ac-
count on what in England is still called Daltonism (Dalton 1798) - and
because classical urine inspection was focused on color, we may assume
an additional irony in the caricature. Moreover, Dalton gazes at the ves-
sel as if he was reading a book, which one would expect from the presi-
dent of a literary society. Thus, the caricaturist employed the uroscopy/
imposter motif and adjusted it with subtlety to the case of Dalton: The
president of the literary society cannot read books and instead prefers
reading liquids (urine), but he is even unable to do that because of his
color blindness. While the satirical content of this image was certainly
clear for contemporaries of Stephenson, later viewers might have mis-
understood it as a caricature of a scientists engaging in overly pedantic
