Shackled in leg irony: black humour of the lower limb

Mezzotint by Jacob Gole (1660?-1737?) after Annibale Carracci.
Wellcome Library no. 24994i

It is a common experience to have enough feet but not enough shoes. The man shown here is, paradoxically, in the opposite situation: he has plenty of shoes but lacks a foot. The irony has a further twist: he is a shoe-seller whose single surviving foot is unshod, presumably because he cannot afford his own wares. No wonder he needs to keep up his spirits with a tobacco pipe.

Black humour (gallows humour, Galgenhumor) is a common feature of discourse about disability. However much we may deplore the fact, loss of mobility due to amputation of the lower limb -– at the thigh, leg or foot -- has been considered a particularly appropriate subject for such humour, perhaps owing to suppressed fear of losing such mobility as we may have. Irony is a way of playing down the horror of immobility while at the same time acknowledging it; and there can be intellectual pleasure (at least for functional bipeds) in the various paradoxes that can arise from limblessness, which are prominent in the drawings, photographs, prints and paintings in the Wellcome Library shown here.

Watercolour by C.W.D., 1866. Wellcome Library no. 12109i

Loss of a limb in a railway accident elicits no sympathy from this compensation board.
The victim (to Chairman) "Sir, in consequence of the carelessness of your servants. I have been compelled to have my leg amputated, besides suffering other injuries, and I consider myself entitled to compensation."
Facetious director. "Lost your leg have yer? Regular stumps etc? - Well! If yer any-think of a cricketer it must be an ill-convenience!"
Benevolent chairman. "Quite right sir - qu-i-te right, compensation by all means, loss of leg - eh? - an unfortunate accident that for all of us." (To secretary) "Here Mr Jones award this gentleman twelve shillings for a wooden one - and enter it on the minutes."'
Jones replies: "The usual discount sir I suppose for ready money? That'll make it eleven shillings." Another director adds: "One can't be too cautious but he don't look like a malingerer!".

Coloured etching, 19th century. Wellcome Library no. 44050i

To break one's natural leg is bad enough, but then to break its wooden replacement adds insult to injury. Two approximately contemporary prints show this subject. In the one above, the driver of the offending vehicle is asleep at the reins.

Coloured engraving published by Laurie and Whittle, 24 February 1800. Wellcome Library 44090i

But at least here the victim can smile as he sees the irony of his situation – and it's much less painful this time round for the young sailor who had lost his leg in the Far East. Fortunately a carpenter is passing with a saw and pot of glue in hand; "A broken leg, or the carpenter is the best surgeon. Haloo! Young Glewpot, de ye see Jack Junk has shivered his timbers, and we want a splice here." The surgeon coming out of his house on the left has no part to play on this occasion, and is pushed away.



There are even positive advantages to losing a leg!


Here another seadog has lost both his legs to the naval surgeon, but there's one compensation: no more suffering from corns ("Keine Hühneraugen mehr!").

 

Lithograph after Johann Bahr, 1909. Wellcome Library no. 577262i

Etching by Frederick Carter, 1928. Wellcome Library no. 44343i (Wellcome Library/©RG Clark)

"What, no legs? Lucky man!" are the words spoken by Ahasuerus (the Wandering Jew) to an immobile Spanish beggar in Frederick Carter's gloomy etching. It is the Jew's misfortune to be forever moving over the face of the earth without respite; the beggar's not to be able to move at all. You can see the world, or you can have a rest, but you can't do both.

Discarded crutches at Lourdes. Photograph, 1937. Wellcome Library no. 578619i

Once a leg has been lost, surely only a miracle could make it grow again. It was a friend of the writer Anatole France (1844-1924) who, contemplating the hundreds of discarded crutches at Lourdes, murmured "Une seule jambe de bois en dirait bien davantage" (Just one wooden leg would be much more significant). [1]

Coloured lithograph by C.J. Grant, 1834.
Wellcome Library no. 11854i.

The regrowth of a natural leg from an amputation stump was considered absurd enough to be worthy of an advertisement for Morison’s pills – the heavily-advertised vegetable remedy for diseases attributed to iatrogenic blood poisoning. The man on the left went to bed with wooden legs, took a dose of Morison's Universal Pills, and "when I awakes in the morning to kick off the clothes, I'm blessed if I didn't find myself with these 'ere couple of jolly good legs and my old wooden ones right at the bottom of the bed!!!".

 Yet … looking towards a future age of stem-cell therapy, who would claim that regeneration of a limb could not occur?

Colour lithograph by H.G. Banks, ca. 1899.
Wellcome Library no. 556713i

It would need more than stem-cell therapy to put poor Callaghan together again. In the song What will poor Callaghan do? a disabled soldier has his wooden legs stolen by four drinking companions in a bar.

The song describes an evening out for four stage-Irishmen called Hogan, Casey, Murphy and "me"; originally "me" was Michael Nolan, a popular Irish music-hall performer. They had spent all their money drinking beer in a pub with an ex-Highland soldier called Patsy Callaghan, who had had his legs shot off from under his kilt when at war. To recover their funds, they got Callagahan drunk, removed his wooden legs and false teeth, pawned them, and left Callaghan literally legless on the pub bench. His plight, depicted on the front cover of the songsheet, is regarded by all as hilarious, though the speaker can't help wondering (in the words of the chorus) "What will poor Callaghan do?".

Michael Nolan asking "What will poor Callaghan do?"

Poor Callaghan was a precursor (or, from another point of view, a post-mediaeval successor) to The Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) who unwillingly makes comedy out of limb-deprivation. "'Tis but a scratch!" he says after losing one arm, "It's just a flesh-wound!" after losing the other, and "All right, we'll call it a draw" after finally losing both legs. Before the Black Knight, one-leggedness had been the subject of another piece of tasteless comedy: One leg too few, a sketch written by Peter Cook while a Cambridge undergraduate in 1960. For this sketch Cook appears to have coined the Latin-derived word "unidexter" to denote a person with one leg, although there was already a Greek-derived word in English, namely "monopod". Again there was an ironic twist of which some audiences were unaware: the actor playing the one-legged role (Dudley Moore) had had club-feet as a child and still had one ineffective leg. Irony and club-foot lead us on the well-intentioned but disastrous operation in Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), but we have enough space here merely to allude to it.

Oil painting attributed to the Master of Los Balbases, Burgos, ca. 1495.
Wellcome Library no. 46009i

Conversely, many people are shocked by the absence of irony in this Spanish altarpiece showing a verger's dream. The verger dreams that his bad leg is substituted by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian with the leg of a black man, and on waking, finds it is true. Some viewers tend to resort to jocularity, showing that they are sophisticated enough to realize that transplants cannot routinely be performed by such means, but not knowledgeable enough to understand the episode as a miracle that could, for example, comfort diabetics. 

The dream of Saint John Damascene: the Virgin attaches his severed right hand.
Drawing, 16--. Wellcome Library no. 651341i

Similar pictures showing the reattachment of a hand do not seem to arouse the same facetiousness. But then in favourable circumstances, surgical reattachment of a hand (or for that matter a foot) to its original limb is not impossible today, according to this popular webpage about "fascinating reattachment surgeries". That really is something to be glad about.

The first examples discussed here have irony and humour, while the last two examples show that in religious contexts lack of a limb could be represented without humour and without irony. Let's end with an example that has irony but not (I suggest) humour.

Engraving by L. Gaultier, ca. 1613. Wellcome Library no. 571261i

This engraving by Léonard Gaultier (1561-1641) shows a man with a wooden leg carrying arms, legs and feet in a basket. At first sight it appears to have a similar subject to the Dutch mezzotint after Annibale Carracci (top).

However, it is a detail of a broadsheet designed by the Franciscan friar Martin Meurisse (1584-1644) to teach logic in Paris in 1613. If it is the nature of man to be a biped, is a "unidexter" a man? And if the function of a foot is locomotion, does a detached foot have the nature of a foot? The answer is that parts that naturally belong to an entity and are necessary for its completion, if removed from that entity, are reduced to predicates of it. Students whose minds have been befuddled by the many distinctions in Aristotle's writings on logic will have been glad to have had such a vivid and ironic image to remind them of how the contingencies relate to the substance of human life.

[1] Anatole France, Le jardin d’Epicure (1895), Paris 1923, p. 158

Geffrye Museum Study Day: 'At Home with the World'

As part of their current exhibition At Home With the World, the Geffrye Museum is hosting a study day on 19th May, at which historians, specialists and curators will explore the themes of the exhibition in greater depth.

Topics discussed on the day will range from the development of Tudor and Stuart Gardens to orientalist interior decoration in the Victorian home. In one of the talks, Helen Wakely, Archivist, Wellcome Library, will draw upon our collections to reveal 'A Global Reader's Digest' - showing how health literature and recipe books from the 17th and 18th centuries reveal domestic responses in England to new global commodities, ideas and tastes.

More details on the study day are available from the Geffrye Museum's website (pdf).

Image: A girl pours coffee from a cup into a saucer. Colour halftone from an engraving by L. Marin, (Wellcome Library no. 25219i)

New article on a portrait of record

Drawing by Pierre Chasselat.
 Wellcome Library no. 729420i

An exceptional neoclassical portrait drawing that was acquired by the Wellcome Library in 2010 is the subject of an article in the current (April 2012) issue of The Burlington magazine. [1] The drawing, by Pierre Chasselat (1753-1814), is a portrait of the French surgeon A.-B. Imbert-Delonnes who, in the same year as the creation of the drawing (1800), served under Napoleon at the battle of Marengo. He was also involved in a number of controversial episodes, some of which are commemorated in the drawing.

 Following Marc Fecker's identification of the previously unidentified sitter as Imbert-Delonnes, the article, by Marc Fecker and William Schupbach, places  the drawing in the context of other works by Chasselat and by Jacques-Louis David (they were both pupils of Joseph-Marie Vien), and identifies the various works of furniture, painting, and sculpture shown in the portrait, among them (in the lower left corner) an oval portrait of the mayor of Angoulême, Perier de Gurat. Perier de Gurat suffered from appalling facial tumours which Imbert-Delonnes removed through a long and painful surgical operation. The engravings below, published by Imbert-Delonnes, show Perier de Gurat before and after that operation.

 

Above, Perier de Gurat before and after surgical removal of his tumours by Imbert-Delonnes in 1798/1799. 
Plates to Ange-Bernard Imbert-Delonnes, Nouvelles considérations sur le cautère actuel, Avignon 1812.

Here (right) is the detail from the lower left corner of Chasselat's drawing, showing the painting by Joseph Bose from which the first engraving of Perier de Gurat was made. The open book in front of it is a volume of the works of one of Imbert-Delonnes's professional role-models, Ambroise Paré (1510?-1590).

 Other details of the drawing are elucidated in the article. The drawing was purchased by the Wellcome Library with the aid of the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and The Art Fund, to whom go the renewed thanks of the Library.

 [1] Marc Fecker and William Schupbach, 'A recently discovered portrait of the surgeon Ange-Bernard Imbert-Delonnes (1747-1818) by Pierre Chasselat', The Burlington magazine, April 2012, 154: 236-240.

The Georgian medicine vendor as physician: William Brodum

Wellcome Library no. 20131i

A watercolour in the Wellcome Library (left) shows an interior with three figures.  In the centre a plump, self-satisfied looking man  looks down with approval at the work of the second figure, on the right, who is Death himself. Death is a tall and physically active skeleton wearing a tie-wig: he vigorously stirs a pestle in a mortar to grind up ingredients for medicines. Some pharmaceutical vessels are shown on the floor around them, and the shelves in the background are full of apothecary's glassware.  The third figure is a woman patient who sits in front of the fireplace on the left, gripped by illness.

The obvious interpretation is that the man is an apothecary (pharmacist), hence the glassware on the shelves of his house. Death is the apothecary's business partner, making up medicines with lethal side-effects: clearly the woman is going to die as a result of taking the harmful medicine. Right?

No, not exactly.  If the setting is an apothecary's shop, the sick woman wearing night-clothes would be sitting in front of the fire in the pharmacist's establishment, not in her own home. To explain that improbability, one would have to assume that she is meant to be a member of his household -- which would rather reduce the applicability of the joke and take the edge off the humour. As the watercolour is attributed to the ever-humorous Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827), that would be a problem.

A possible clue to the subject came to light in January 2012 when Christie's in New York offered at auction another watercolour version of the same composition, inscribed in what looks like Rowlandson's hand "Dr Brodum and his assistant at work pro publico bono". [1] So who was Dr Brodum?

Wellcome Library no. 1397i

William Brodum (right) was one of several members of the Georgian medical fringe who were portrayed by caricaturists. Samuel Phillips Eady, also portrayed by Rowlandson and discussed in this blog-post, was another who could be so described. Unlike Eady, Brodum is dignified by an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), where evidence is cited that he was a Danish Jew, born Issachar Cohen in Copenhagen around 1767. [2] He came to England around 1787 to work for another medicine vendor (Dr Bossy), using the name William Brodum. He obtained an Aberdeen M.D. degree in 1791, and from his house at 9 Albion Street, Blackfriars Road, London, launched his own career as a medicine vendor, specializing in two product lines: "Doctor Brodum's Botanical Syrup for the cure of scorbutic, leprous and scrofulous complaints" and "Doctor Brodum's Nervous Cordial for the cure of consumptive, nervous and debilitated constitutions, and people who have been in hot countries". His advertising for these products included a lot of code words that were euphemisms for syphilis (debility, leprosy, nervous weakness etc.), and the same insinuation was gracefully made in the title and body of a two-volume publication, Guide to old age, or, A cure for the indiscretions of youth (1795), dedicated to King George III, whose favour he received. A miniature portrait of him around this time was published in an engraving by Ezekiel Abraham Ezekiel (1757–1806), a member of the Jewish community in Exeter (above).

Brodum was therefore both a commercial medicine vendor and a doctor of medicine. Since the two professions were theoretically distinct and incompatible, problems could arise with the regulatory bodies, one of which was the Royal College of Physicians of London. In practice, this combination was not unusual at the time: Sir Hans Sloane, Dr Robert James, and Dr Richard Mead were among physicians associated with proprietary medicines (chocolate in Sloane's case), a fact which led one commentator to ask "Have not members of the College dined at Dr Brodum's table?". [3] In any case, Brodum was summoned before the College and told he could not accept consultation fees and should remove from his house the brass plate which described him as “Dr Brodum”. Brodum refused to accept this ruling, and the academic authorities in Aberdeen did not appreciate the College’s scorn for the value of their doctorate. Brodum continued to visit patients for an advertised cost of 5 guineas a week, while outpatients could visit him at his house every Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. [4]

Whether by accident or design,the goings-on in Rowlandson's watercolour fit this situation perfectly. If the man is meant to be identified with Brodum -- he died in 1824 and Rowlandson in 1827 -- we need not ask whether it shows a medicine vendor or a physician. Brodum and Death together make up the medicines at Brodum's pharmaceutical laboratory in Southwark, while the patient in the background, huddled in front of her own fireplace, represents the use to which the medicine will be put in Brodum's medical practice.

[1] Christie's, Old Master and early British drawings and watercolors, New York, Rockefeller Plaza, 26 January 2012, lot 38

[2] Edgar Samuel, 'Brodum, William (fl. 1767–1824)', Oxford dictionary of national biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008. Brodum wrote that he was "born and bred" in the same country as the Queen, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, in north Germany (Guide to old age, or, A cure for the indiscretions of youth, 1795, vol. 1, fol. A2r)

[3] Roy Porter, Health for sale, Manchester 1989, p. 9

[4] William Brodum, Guide to old age, or, A cure for the indiscretions of youth, 1795, pp. 153-155

Mesmerism on show

Mesmeric therapy. Wellcome Library no. 44754i

Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) was the promoter of a form of animal magnetism (named Mesmerism after him), at first in Vienna (1773-1777) and subsequently in France (1778-1784). His unique selling point was the supply of mesmeric fluid that served to rebalance the magnetic polarity of the animal body. His doctrine was one of many that sought to bring the animal body (the microcosm) into harmony with the larger world outside (the macrocosm). Such doctrines have a long history, from Hippocratic aphorisms about the effects of weather on certain temperaments to our contemporaries' warnings about asthma, allergies and air pollution.

As a therapist, Mesmer, like other innovators (James Graham, Edward Jenner, John Brown etc.) offered his therapy outside the established world of academia, the court, and the royal colleges. Indeed, they sometimes came into conflict, as Mesmer did in Paris. Both his popular appeal and the disdain of the establishment brought him publicity of commercial value.

Hence the many depictions of his therapeutic sessions. One of them is shown in an oil painting in the Wellcome Library (above). The patients are seated around Mesmer’s baquet, a large flat drum containing mesmeric fluid. Pipes, tubes and cords emerging from the drum could be applied to the affected parts: one man on the far left is winding a cord doused in mesmeric fluid around his head, while several others are applying the ends of the tubes to their eyes (detail left). A woman in Turkish dress in the centre foreground is treating the eye of a child to a dose of the mesmeric fluid.

While oil paintings were seen by few, prints were seen by many, if only in the shop windows of print-sellers and stationers in the high streets of towns and cities. Among several prints of mesmeric therapy in the Wellcome Library is this coloured engraving of Mesmer in Paris (above), with text below describing the scene (Wellcome Library no. 17918i). It shows one gentleman resting his right foot on the drum so that mesmerism can be applied to his shin. There is also a view through to a second baquet in a room off at the left.

Until today, the catalogue description of this print made no mention of any of the authors (artist, designer, engraver or publisher) of this print: it was by an unidentified hand.However, Sotheby's have in their forthcoming drawings sale in New York a pair of drawings attributed to the artist Claude-Louis Desrais (1746-1816), and one of them (Sotheby's Old master drawings, New York 25 January 2012, lot 123) is the original design for the Wellcome Library's coloured engraving. Indeed Sotheby's say in their catalogue record that this drawing and a similiar one by Desrais were "probably intended for prints or book illustrations as they are reddened on the reverse". However, as the Wellcome Library print is much cruder in execution than the drawing -– Sotheby's drawing has much finer detail -- there may have been an intermediary print or drawing from which the Wellcome Library's engraving was copied. An impression of the same engraving is also in the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland, and no doubt there are others elsewhere.

The attribution to Desrais on stylistic grounds is satisfying because Desrais is known to have produced a portrait of Mesmer (right: Wellcome Library no. 23327i). If he was Mesmer's in-house image-maker, then, although he does not seem to be recorded as an oil-painter, could the Wellcome Library's painting also be by him? It does look like the work of someone unaccustomed to such a cumbersome medium.

The other drawing at Sotheby's (same sale, lot 124) shows a woman standing within a circular knee-high cage surrounded by three men in animated conversation. Another man (left) seems to be turning up a gas light, while on the right a demonstration is taking place of a closed vessel on a column. Perhaps someone familiar with public demonstrations of natural philosophy in Paris at this period can identify the event? It should be dated not later than 1816, the year of Desrais's death.

Music of the blind

Blind musicians in Paris. Detail of lithograph by Martin Sylvestre Baptiste, 1828. Wellcome Library no. 16519i

An article by Ingrid Sykes in the latest issue of Medical History considers the blind in Paris from an unusual angle: their sound. One might think that the blind would sound the same as the sighted, but no, not in Paris in the years before and after the French Revolution. [1]

There was in Paris a mediaeval institution called the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts, founded by King Louis IX in the thirteenth century. The Hospice was a self-governing community of 300 (quinze-vingts, or 15 x 20) blind and partially sighted men and women, their spouses and their children. The hospice's autonomy and antiquity, its often truculent and anarchic spirit, the fact that it was founded by a king and protected by a cardinal (the Grand Almoner, Cardinal de Rohan), all brought it into conflict with the new spirit of improvement and control in the French Enlightenment.

The character of the Hospice was expressed in its sound. The musicians of the Quinze-Vingts could be heard in Paris on the streets, at fairs, and at an all-night café. Fiddlers, woodwind performers and vocalists produced a raucous popular sound in which successive members would perform as soloists followed by a chorus in which all performers would join. The results were variously described as "depraved", "threatening", and even as "une scène si déshonorante pour l'espèce humaine" (a scene dishonourable to the human race). The politer sort would give them some small change in order to make them go away. The print above shows one of the Quinze-Vingts bands in their outlandish costume about to have a brawl on the street with a rival amputee musician.

Left, Valentin Haüy,with, far left, his brother, the crystallographer René-Just Haüy. Engraving by the brothers Boilly, Jules and Alphonse; Wellcome Library no. 545537i

A performance by a Quinze-Vingts band made a deep, though not favourable, impression on the reformer Valentin Haüy (1745-1822). It was after hearing a performance of the Quinze-Vingts, described by him as "cette atrocité", that Valentin Haüy decided to found a new institution for the blind, organized along more up-to-date lines. [2] This was the Institut des Jeunes Aveugles (Institute for Blind Youth), a typical Enlightenment institution. Secular, educational, managed by the sighted, run by the state and not by the church, the new organization's nature was signalled by its name: not a mediaeval Hospice but a structured Institut.

Aquatint with etching by Marlé, 1805. Wellcome Library no. 545557i

The character of the Institut was also signalled by its musical performances. Instead of the popular music of the Quinze-Vingts, the blind would be trained in the harmonic system of the composer Rameau: the new system was based on Cartesian mathematics and was published in a book ominously entitled Code de musique pratique (1761).

The Hospice had always existed and was there by Royal fiat. The Institut was an innovation and was there for a purpose. In the 1790s attempts were made by the revolutionaries to suppress the Hospice, invoking the inmates' licentious life-style and spirit of independence. Suppression was avoided, but, despite their disparate characters, the Hospice and the Institut were amalgamated in 1805, largely for financial reasons. The print above recording Pope Pius VII's visit in that year shows the more decorous appearance of the blind, their more harmonious means of music-making, and their more regimented organization under the Institut.





















Sébastien Guillié (1780-1865). Left, as a young man: lithograph by C. Motte. Wellcome Library no. 3852i. His initial is given as J by mistake. Right, in later life: photograph by Giraudon, 1865. Wellcome Library no. 12835i

The merger did not last. In 1816 a new director, the despotic doctor Sébastien Guillié (above), determined to rid the Institut of its association with the Quinze-Vingts: he moved it away to a new site where, in the name of progress, he could carry out ophthalmological experiments on the blind children selected as his victims. [3] The Quinze-Vingts musicians continued their performances on the street for some years more, but could not defy change indefinitely: their building is now the site of a modern ophthalmological centre, the Centre Hospitalier National d'Ophtalmologie des Quinze-Vingts à Paris.

There is more to it than that, and more is provided in the article, which is available free online. One last point: the whole story would provide marvellous material for an opera. Richard Strauss and Clemens Krauss wrote Capriccio about different genres of drama and the relation between words and music. Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill included in The Threepenny Opera street songs and conflict with the police. Perhaps the authors of Les Misérables would like to produce a successor to those works, based on the struggles of the Quinze-Vingts? There would be a dramatic conflict between the two types of music, the protagonists on each side would provide plenty of character, and there would be scope for a variety of indoor and outdoor sets. And Victor Hugo himself could have a cameo role: according to the article, he was one of the champions of the Quinze-Vingts in their struggle against bureaucracy.

[1] Ingrid Sykes, 'Sounding the "Citizen–Patient": the politics of voice at the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts in post-Revolutionary Paris', Medical history, 2011 October; 55(4): 479–502. Available free online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3199644/

[2] Pierre Henri, La vie et l'œuvre de Valentin Haüy, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984, pp 37-43 (find in the Wellcome Library here)

[3] Zina Weygand, The blind in French society from the Middle Ages to the century of Louis Braille, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009, pp. 261-267 (find in the Wellcome Library here)

Approaching Sikandra

Everyone who visits Agra in Uttar Pradesh visits the Taj Mahal, the monument which was built from 1632 onwards by the sorrowful Shah Jahan (1592-1666), fifth Mughal emperor, in memory of his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, after her death in childbirth.

Not everyone visits nearby Sikandra. Here, those who do will find the magnificent earlier mausoleum of Akbar (1542-1605), the mighty third Mughal emperor, conqueror of northern India, patron of arts and sciences, and grandfather of Shah Jahan. [1] The mausoleum (above) was planned by Akbar himself and built by his son Jahangir (1569-1627) between 1605 and 1613. At Sikandra, the future builder of the Taj Mahal could therefore contemplate the mausoleum of his grandfather, built by his father. One might suppose that the earlier mausoleum would have influenced the later.

The historically-aware visitor would therefore want to view the Taj Mahal in the perspective of Sikandra, inter alia and vice versa. And many people have done so. The views of some of them on the Taj will be the subject of another posting on this blog. The present posting, however, concerns some of the many paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and written accounts of Sikandra that have found their way into historic British collections such as the India Office Library in the British Library, the British Museum, the Wellcome Library and no doubt others. This posting reviews some of the drawings and prints of Sikandra in the Wellcome Library, a repository of (among other things) records of sepulchralia of all kinds, and of Indian history.

Coloured soft-ground etching with watercolour by William Hodges, 1788.
Wellcome Library no. 26689i

We start on the approach road, in the company of William Hodges (1744-1797). Under the patronage of Warren Hastings, Hodges had sketched Sikandra on the spot in the early 1780s, and produced this print in 1788 --a year in which India was in the news in England because Burke, Fox and Sheridan were railing against Hastings at the opening of the latter’s trial in Westminster. The road at Sikandra as seen by Hodges is a broad dirt-track with a couple of donkeys on it, surrounded on either side with dilapidated minor tombs scattered in a park. More inviting than the immediate surroundings is the prospect of fine buildings glimpsed through the trees on the far right.

Coloured etching and aquatint by Thomas Daniell, 1795.
Wellcome Library no. 27432i

We next find ourselves tranported not only to the end of the road but also forwards seven years to the year 1795, when this aquatint by Thomas Daniell was published (above). It shows the leftmost of those buildings glimpsed through the trees: it is one of the gateways leading to the the mausoleum of Akbar. Though only a gateway, it is a grand building of sandstone topped with four white marble minarets. Not so long previously, vandalistic snipers have had some sport shooting the tops clean off those minarets. In the clearing in front of the gateway, a military camp is still in residence: it is a British one, to which the artist Thomas Daniell is attached.

In the early nineteenth century Indian artists also produced views of the building, presumably for purchase in the main by western visitors. These are commonly called Company drawings (after the East India Company), and those in the Wellcome Library are characteristic examples. One watercolour (left: Wellcome Library no. 25209i is small and relatively simplified, though attractive enough to its previous owner to be put into a gold frame.

However, the painter of a larger one (39 x 56.3 cm., below Wellcome Library no. 579856i), spares no effort to do justice to the elaborate flower and leaf motifs realized in pietra dura around the central doorway.


A photograph taken in 2008 (right) shows that the tops of the minarets have been restored. By comparison with the painting above, the photograph vindicates the great care taken by the watercolour artist. The minarets themselves may be called the grandfathers of those which stand at the four corners of the Taj Mahal.

Soft-ground etching by William Hodges. Wellcome Library no. 26823i

The gateway at Sikandra leads to a long walkway at the end of which is the mausoleum of Akbar the Great. Starting again with Hodges in 1788 (above), he shows the building as being obscured by vegetation. There seems to be no picture of the mausoleum by Daniell, but there are plenty of Company drawings by Indian artists, made slightly later and showing the building (actually or ideally) cleared of trees and bushes, perhaps in order to show it as they imagined it to be at the time of Akbar's interment.

Wellcome Library no. 579159i

This view (above), like three others in the Wellcome Library, shows an interplay between a white marble colonnade on the ground floor and three sandstone terraces above adorned at the corners with domes of the Rajasthan type (chhatris).

In current photographs of the building, that interplay no longer exists: the ground floor arcade seems to be painted red. All however show the topmost terrace as of crisply carved white marble, marking by its filigree craftsmanship and costly materials the cenotaph of Akbar, high above his actual tomb directly below in the crypt.

The Company paintings (such as, left: Wellcome Library no 25226i) differ among themselves in showing the setting of the building in varying perspectives in relation to its surrounding char bagh or Persian pleasure garden: the setting provides cooling channels for running water, gardens and pools.

The effect of the setting is to emphasize that even the humblest of the living can here enjoy the created world more than Akbar, for all his power, now that he is dead. One small but highly detailed watercolour (right: Wellcome Library no. 578936i) is taken from a viewpoint so close to the central runnel that the base of the first story is no longer visible, apparently as a gesture to western artistic conventions.

Finally, there is a complete outlier (left: Wellcome Library 575709i) in which the building is condensed so that the long first-storey terrace becomes the same width as the second storey. An inadvertent slighting of His Imperial Majesty! As we do not need to rely on this watercolour alone, we can afford to sympathize with the artist's mistake. The noble resting place of the mighty Akbar, author of this and other admirable buildings, remains for the recreation and inspiration of those lucky enough to visit it.

[1] Irfan Habib (ed.), Akbar and his India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997 (find in the Wellcome Library here)

Further reading
Catherine B. Asher, Architecture of Mughal India, Cambridge 1992 (The New Cambridge history of India, part I, vol. 4), pp. 105-111 (find in the Wellcome Library here )

Mildred Archer, Early views of India: the picturesque journeys of Thomas and William Daniell, 1786-1794, London: Thames and Hudson, 1980 (find in the Wellcome Library here)

Ernest Binfield Havell, A handbook to Agra and the Taj, Sikandra, Fatehpur-Sikri and the neighbourhood, London 1912

Thanks to the following for making their photographs available on Flickr.
Top: by Takehiko Ono at http://www.flickr.com/photos/onopko/529915275
Gateway: by Koshyk at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kkoshy/2252005330.
Detail of mausoleum by Saad.Akhtar at http://www.flickr.com/photos/saad/47375523.
Other images: Wellcome Library.

Sir Isaac Newton in Herefordshire

Isaac Newton by James Thornhill. Wellcome Library no. 45765i

Stoke Court, at Stoke Edith in Herefordshire, was a large and imposing house built between 1696 and 1704 by the Foley family, descendants of the ironmasters Richard Foley (1580-1657) and Thomas Foley (1617-1677). One of its finest features was the group of baroque mural paintings made for the house in 1704 by James (later Sir James) Thornhill (1675/6–1734). They were very accomplished Italianate compositions with many figures, drama, allusion and trompe l'oeil.

The creation of the mythological and allegorical paintings for Stoke Court was one of the first major projects undertaken by Thornhill after he became a freeman of the Painter-Stainers' Company in 1703. Following further magnificent decorations at Chatsworth and Greenwich, his career would come to a climax with his paintings in the dome of St Paul's Cathedral (1716-1720), all three ensembles still to be seen today.

However, the equally splendid Stoke Court paintings can no longer be seen: sadly, the Foleys' mansion was consumed by fire on 15 December 1927, and Thornhill's murals perished with it. Judging from photographs, they formed a sight as impressive as anything at Castle Howard or Chatsworth. Thornhill's paintings on canvas were rescued, but subsequently dispersed. Now Jeremy Barker has tracked down several of them in Lancaster House, Eltham Palace, Yale University, and elsewhere, and has published his findings in a new Festschrift. [1]

Besides paintings of such subjects as The marriage of Cupid and Psyche and The triumph of arts and sciences, Thornhill's work at Stoke included only one portrait: a painting of Sir Isaac Newton. According to family tradition recorded by Lady Emily Foley, the painting was acquired because Newton was Master of the Mint when Paul Foley (1644/5-1699), the first builder of Stoke, was Speaker of the House of Commons (having previously been a commissioner of accounts). Foley's Speakership lasted from 1695 to 1698, and Newton took over the Mint in 1696, so this was quite possible. It could not have been painted during that brief period of overlap, as Thornhill's apprenticeship did not end until 1696, but he could have supplied it at a later date.

Where is this painting of Newton today? There are four surviving versions of Thornhill's portrait of Newton, three of which have documented provenances which show that they could never have been at Stoke Court. The fourth is in the Wellcome Library (illustrated above). Having seen the Wellcome Library version, Mr Barker raises the question: could this one have been the painting of Newton at Stoke Court?

At present, the documented provenance of the Wellcome Library's version goes back only as far as the auction at which it was bought by Henry S. Wellcome (1853-1936), the founder of the Wellcome Library. This took place at Foster's auction house at 4 Pall Mall, London, on 13 September 1933, lot 259, where it was misdescribed as "Sir Arthur Newton" (Arthur Newton was the name of a famous marathon-runner of the time).

The painting was attributed to "Zeeman": there was a Dutch marine painter (Reinier Nooms, ca. 1623-ca. 1667) who was known by the name "Zeeman" (meaning sailor), but in this context the cataloguer was more likely referring to the portrait painter Enoch Seeman (1689/90–1744), who came to London from Danzig in 1704. Seeman is sometimes referred to as Zeeman, his earliest dated painting is from 1708, and he painted a portrait of Newton. [2] Seeman's Newton was a lively portrait, very different from Thornhill's melancholy Newton, who has been described in the writer's presence as looking as if he has escaped from the Addams Family. Nevertheless Seeman was not an unreasonable attribution by the standards of the time. (Above left: mezzotint of Newton by J. MacArdell after E. Seeman, 1726. Wellcome Library no. 7410i.)

At Foster's, Wellcome bought the Newton portrait for £3. Although there is no positive evidence of its having been at Stoke Court, its appearance at auction not long after the fire is suggestive. Mr Barker concludes: "All one can say is that there is the possibility (in the author's opinion a strong one) that Lady Emily's picture was indeed the one now in the Wellcome Library. But we can say with absolute certainty that the Wellcome Library got a bargain!"

[1] Jeremy Barker, 'James Thornhill, Thomas Foley and the decoration of Stoke Court, Herefordshire', Essays in honour of Jim & Muriel Tonkin, Hereford: Woolhope Club, 2011, pp. 93-112 (ISBN 978-0-9505823-4-4; details here).

[2] L.H. Cust, 'Seeman, Enoch (1689/90–1744)', rev. Sarah Herring, Oxford dictionary of national biography, Oxford 2004

A Useful Scot

Physician, Geographer, Antiquarian... the activities and interests of Sir Robert Sibbald - born on this day in 1641 - mark him out as one of the most interesting and influential Scotsmen of the the late seventeenth century.

The third son of David Sibbald, keeper of the great seal of Scotland, Robert Sibbald made the most of his social connections in life, rising to become physician-in-ordinary to the King, Geographer Royal for Scotland and also the first Professor of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Perhaps most importantly, he was one of the founder members of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, being elected as its President in 1684 (the Library of the College is named after him).

Sibbald can be seen as an examplar of early Enlightenment thinking: his interlinked interests were central to his aims in rationalising the value of the natural and human resources of Scotland. Or, in other words he sought the "creation of useful natural knowledge" [1]. To Sibbald, attempts at promoting the economic interests of a nation, could only properly be achieved after a detailed survey of its resources was completed.

Although Sibbald's attempts at such a "Scottish Atlas" remained unpublished, the Wellcome Library holds copies of two works, The history, ancient and modern, of the sheriffdoms of Fife and Kinross and Description of the islands of Orkney and Zetland, which stemmed from the collection of correspondence which the unpublished work was based upon. We also hold a copy of Auctarium Musaei Balfouriani e Musaeo Sibbaldino, the catalogue of the cabinet of natural history specimens which Sibbald and Andrew Balfour, a close scientific colleague, presented to the University of Edinburgh.

Sibbald was in close correspondence with fellow virtuosi at the Royal Society in London, sharing with them an outlook on how a closer understanding of the world could shape the future prosperity of a society. Indeed, Sibbald tried - and failed - to establish a Royal Society of Scotland, along similar lines to other learned academies.

A key figure in the growth of Enlightenment values in Scotland, Sibbald also had close relations to another burgeoning Scottish interest. Rather painful ones however, as in 1690 he was injured after being struck in the face by a golf club.

[1] Sibbald, Sir Robert (1641-1722), physician and geographer, by Charles W.J. Withers, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Image: Sir Robert Sibbald. Line engraving by W. H. Lizars after J. Alexander. (Wellcome Library no. 8552i)

Medical Spectators

On this day in 1711, the first issue of The Spectator was published [1]. Initially written by Richard Steele and Joseph Addison - though both Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift contrbuted to later volumes - it ran every day except Sunday until 1712 and was revived for six months in 1714. It was widely read at the time and consisted of a mixture of news, reviews and commentary. An exemplar of refined thought and wit, The Spectator is recognised as one of the most influential publications of its time. Copies of all eight of its collected volumes are held in the Wellcome Library.

The Spectator provides some choice insights into opinions of medical and scientific knowledge, and their impact upon contemporary society. For instance, an exploration of its volumes finds a discussion of the merits of maternal breast-feeding (December 12, 1711. No 246) and the ill-treatment of children (August 30, 1711. No 157).

Perhaps more expected is the ridiculing of the medical expression, with physicians readily lampooned, whether for their mistreatment of patients ("...we may lay it down as a Maxim, that When a Nation abounds in Physicians, it grows thin of people") or in their misdirected and painful experiments:

"...there are [other] innumerable Retainers to Physick, who, for want of other Patients, amuse themselves with the stifling of Cats in an Air Pump, cutting up Dogs alive, or impaling Insects upon the point of a Needle for Microscopical Observations; besides those that are employed in the gathering of Weeds, and the Chase of Butterflies..." (both quotes March 24, 1711. No 24).

Those seeking the services of physicians did not escape criticism: with swooning ladies of fashion being gently skewered thus:

"...a great part of Ceremony and Good-breeding among Ladies turns upon their Uneasiness; and I'll undertake, if the How-d'ye Servants of our Women were to make a Weekly Bill of Sickness, as the Parish Clerks do of Mortality, you would not find in an Account of seven Days, one in Thirty that was not downright Sick or indisposed..." (August 14, 1711. No 143)

The Spectator can also be accessed remotely by Library users through the Burney Collection. For more detail on the themes above, see Fielding H. Garrison, 'Medicine in the Tatler, Spectator and Guardian', Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, Vol. 2, No.8 (1934), pp477-503.

Image: Joseph Addison

[1] The Spectator's weekly namesake, which is still published today, is a different publication which was launched in 1828.

"In an admirable manner": Darwinism on the grapevine

Left: woodcut by K. Egawa after a painting by Ryūrikyō, 18th century. Wellcome Library no. 730398i

This Japanese woodcut (left: click on image to enlarge) can be considered from several points of view, one of which is its unwitting role as an illustration of evolution, or rather coevolution. A pair of vines climb up around the stem of a bamboo plant, which helps the vines to grow fruit that serves as food to a grateful bird. Each of the three organisms has an environmental niche enabled by the other two. For example the bamboo serves as a support to the vine enabling the latter to expand its trunk and extend its branches. The bird uses the grape as food and then returns the favour to the vine by kindly depositing the seeds of the grape elsewhere in a ready-made bed of nitrogen-rich fertilizer. Bamboo is grown by humans for innumerable purposes such as bamboo shoots for food and bamboo stems as scaffolding for buildings. Conversely, vines that were less able to entwine themselves around the bamboo, or failed to grow big juicy grapes, failed in the struggle for life and are no longer with us, and the same is held to be true, mutatis mutandis, for bamboo and birds.

One would think that Charles Robert Darwin would have relished it -- all the more so because one of his lesser known publications was a treatise 'On the movements and habits of climbing plants' which was read on 2 February 1865 to the Linnean Society of London, published in its Journal in the same year, and reissued with a different title and revised text in 1882 (and subsequently). He discusses questions such as exactly how climbing plants like the vine manage to pull themselves up round any kind of support such as a vineyard trellis or a bamboo. He replies with a remorselessly systematic micro-analysis of the mechanisms involved: climbing plants are of two kinds, those that revolve around a stem and those endowed with irritable organs which, when they touch any object, clasp it. Torsion, rotation and circumnutation are among their subroutines.

Wood engraving of Bryonia dioica, from Charles Darwin,
The movements and habits of climbing plants, London 1891, p. 165.
Wellcome Library

However, the larger implications are always present. For example, how does the vine find the bamboo in the first place? Natural selection is predictably his ready-made reply: "The first purpose of the spontaneous revolving movement [of an entwining plant]… is to favour the shoot finding a support" (revised version pp. 14-15).

Darwin's conclusion is as follows, starting with a dig at the ever-present Aristotle:

"It has often been vaguely asserted that plants are distinguished from animals by not having the power of movement. It should rather be said that plants acquire and display this power only when it is of some advantage to them; this being of comparatively rare occurrence, as they are affixed to the ground, and food is brought to them by the air and rain. We see how high in the scale of organization a plant may rise, when we look at one of the more perfect tendril-bearers. It first places its tendrils ready for action, as a polypus places its tentacula. If the tendril be displaced, it is acted on by the force of gravity and rights itself. It is acted on by the light, and bends towards or from it, or disregards it, whichever may be most advantageous. During several days the tendril or internodes, or both, spontaneously revolve with a steady motion. The tendril strikes some object, and quickly curls round and firmly grasps it. In the course of some hours it contracts into a spire, dragging up the stem, and forming an excellent spring. All movements now cease. By growth the tissues soon become wonderfully strong and durable. The tendril has done its work, and done it in an admirable manner."

Note the value judgment in the last sentence. In describing the tendril as having "done its work … in an admirable manner ", Darwin uses language that that would normally be applied to a craftsperson such as the Japanese artists of our woodcut. A positive admirability in carrying out a defined task seems to be what drives all the processes mentioned here. It is what makes people want to buy and disseminate the work of the painter Ryūrikyō, while the lack of it in lesser painters prevents the survival of the works of these latter.

In fact there are several layers of competition going on here. The vines, the bamboo and the bird are competing with their respective rivals in the struggle for existence. Those depicted here have succeeded. The work of the painter Ryūrikyō was carried out in such an "admirable manner" that K. Egawa made a woodcut of it – again "in an admirable manner", for he (or more likely the pressman T. Tamura) has added individual snow flakes in gouache: it is late in the season, the leaves are sere, the bird is getting cold and needs nourishment. Within the environment or context of evolution, this work is more admirable than that of artists generally considered superior, such as this 1856 dramatic scene (right) by the illustrious Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III), where the gourd-bearing cucurbitacea entwines itself around a pergola.

Above right: two actors playing as Matsushita Kahiji and Konoshita Tokichi. Colour woodcut by Kunisada I, 1856. Wellcome Library no. 35847i

Moving to another layer, Charles Darwin's literary comment on the events depicted was apt enough to be quoted in illustration of the processes of the winding vines. Darwin originally wrote "food is brought to them by the wind and rain" but later changed "wind and rain" to "air and rain" to cover himself in cases such as humid summer days when the air is still. The original phrasing including the word "wind" lost out in the struggle for existence. Darwin's text has "evolved" thanks to his rephrasing of it "in an admirable manner".

Then, just as the admirable features of the luscious grapes attracted the bird, so the admirable features of the woodcut led to its being acquired by Henry S. Wellcome and reproduced on this blog named after him: as the process has got this far, it must have been accomplished "in an admirable manner". Many other prints, paintings and photographs which could have been reproduced were rejected. And if all these things had not been carried out "in an admirable manner", you would not now be reading these words, as they would, minutes ago, have lost the competitive struggle for your attention.

Within a collection of documents as broad and many-sided as the Wellcome Library, all may look at first sight as peaceful as a country hedgerow or river bank. Once you start to look at it in detail, draw connections, make comparisons, and note differences, it begins to look as complex as the habitat so vividly described by Darwin and republished in an earlier posting on this blog: seething with an invisible struggle for existence, meaning, significance, and delight.

Notes

The original version of Darwin's work was 'On the movements and habits of climbing plants', Journal of the Linnean Society of London (Botany), 1865, 9: 1-118; available online in The complete work of Charles Darwin online at http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=side&itemID=F834a&pageseq=1

The revised version bears the title The movements and habits of climbing plants, London: John Murray, 1891; available online in The complete work of Charles Darwin online at http://darwin-online.org.uk/pdf/1882_Movements_F839.pdf . Darwin's "concluding remarks" are on p. 206

The woodcut reproduced at the top has a guard sheet containing an attribution of the original painting to Ryûrikyô. The British Museum online catalogue has four paintings attributed to an artist of the same name, who is identified as an 18th century follower of Yanagisawa Kien (1704-1758). He seems to be not the same as the better-known Ryūryūkyo Shinsai (fl. 1799-1823).