Item of the month, July 2011: On this day in Amsterdam ...

This print (left) sits in the Wellcome Library among a group of Dutch posters about the use of recreational drugs. It is exceptional for its casual production values: scraps of paper torn out of a notebook, containing incoherent verses which surround incompetently scrawled drawings, photographed on a ready made background and put together with whatever editing software was available for such purposes in 1995, the date on one of the drawings.

The scrawl can however be forgiven, as the author of these drawings was not a professional artist, and their incoherence is their whole point. As the signature "brood" indicates, they are the manic ramblings of Herman Brood (right), the charismatic Dutch rock-and-roll star whose well-publicised life was fuelled by drug-use: chiefly LSD, cannabis, heroin, amphetamines and alcohol. His heyday was the 1970s and 1980s. When the music industry became too strenuous, he turned to painting in the graffiti-influenced street styles which have since become more popular than they were then, and, though colour-blind, won some renown as a spraycan artist. This poster is an example of his drawing style, apparently published to dissuade drug users in Amsterdam from following his course in life.

As well they might (be dissuaded). For in Brood's case, years of drug-use had taken their due, and although he had made plans for a new recording with a full orchestra, the future must have looked unappetising to him. On 11 July 2001 he leapt to his death from the top of the Amsterdam Hilton hotel. To remember that moment, and the life that came to a sudden end at that time, a memorial event has been organized to take place there today, 11 July 2011, at 13.15 pm.

Image credits
Poster: Wellcome Library no. 748920i; © DACS 2011

H. Brood in December 2000 with parrot: photograph by Sander Lamme in Wikimedia Commons: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestand:Herman_Brood_2000_Amsterdam_Sander_Lamme.jpg

Hilton Hotel, Apollolaan, Amsterdam: by PatrickDR on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrickdr/2469928582/

The Ice Saints of Johan Thorn-Prikker

Illustration: Johan Thorn-Prikker. Die Drei Eisheiligen (The Three Ice Saints) tapestry design, c1911.

Die Drei Eisheiligen or The Three Ice Saints to give it its English title is the name of a tapestry design produced by the Dutch artist and designer Johann Thorn-Prikker in about 1911. The three Ice Saints of the composition are St. Mamertus, St. Pancras and St. Servatius whose feast days traditionally fell on 11, 12 and 13 May. These three consecutive days were judged by many across Europe from the Netherlands to Poland as being potentially the last burst of cold before the summer weather, although the dates have now changed to the end of May on the Gregorian calendar.

Thorn-Prikker, although born and trained within the Netherlands, spent the last thirty years of his life mostly in neighbouring Germany where he was well known for his decorative and fine art work. From the very beginning of the twentieth century Thorn-Prikker, like many of his fine art contemporaries, was much more interested in the decorative arts side of creativity than he was in fine art painting. However, despite his undoubted enthusiasm for the decorative arts there was always a fine art sensibility to much of Thorn-Prikker's work whether he was involved in the mediums of stained glass, mosaics, book covers, furniture or textiles. Therefore, although The Three Ice Saints tapestry was technically a piece of interior decoration, practically it was a piece of woven fine art, a position that tapestry weaving has long found itself to occupy, with some seeing the discipline as craft, others fine art, others still somewhere in-between.

Whether Thorn-Prikker saw tapestry as fine art, craft, or art craft, is unknown; that he produced an extraordinarily interesting addition to the discipline is without question. Unfortunately, this is the only example of The Three Ice Saints that I have been able to find, and although an unsatisfactory black and white illustration, it still manages to show the artist's original approach to composition. The three saints inhabit their own space within the tapestry, but are worked within a very casual framework, with figures, motifs and the names of the saints themselves overlapping and being squeezed into a small enclosed narrative. The composition is even likely to give the impression of a vying for space, rather than that of a harmonious and spiritual triptych.

It is unknown if this piece was commissioned or was expected to have an eventual ecclesiastical home. It would appear that if was indeed to end up adorning a church interior, it would have been a particularly accommodating venue for the contemporary, not something that seemed immediately apparent, particularly for the era in which it was made, the first few years of the twentieth century. However, to be fair Thorn-Prikker does have a reputation as a religious creative, producing a substantial amount of decorative artwork for various churches throughout the Netherlands and Germany, usually, though not universally in the shape of stained glass. Some of the stained glass that he produced after the First World War and up until his death in 1932 is extraordinarily beautiful and fully contemporary with art and decorative movements of the period. His stained glass work may well be covered in a future article. 

What is interesting is to see this amount of contemporary creative freedom within a craft that was still relatively traditional in 1911. Thorn-Prikker, although choosing to work largely within the decorative arts format, did inject a large element of his fine art sensibility, both naturally his and that revealed during his training at the Royal Academy of Art at The Hague. That tapestry went on in the twentieth century to become a fine art form in its own right, is obviously not entirely due to the work of Thorn-Prikker. However, what this Dutch artist did do is to show that tapestry, rather than being a vehicle for direct imitation of fine art painting, could be used as a medium in its own right with its own rules and conditions which, if allowed to would produce a unique creative piece that was sensitive to both its materials and its construction.

Reference links:
Johan Thorn Prikker
The artist as Christ: The image of the artist in the Netherlands, 1885-1902, with a focus on the Christological imagery of Vincent Van Gogh and Johan Thorn Prikker
JOHAN THORN PRIKKER: GLASFENSTER, WANDERBILDER, ORNAMENTE, 1891-1932. / Johan Thorn Prikker: Stained Glass Windows, Murals, Ornamental Works, 1891-1932 - Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, Germany - 1966
Weaving Sacred Stories: French Choir Tapestries and the Performance of Clerical Identity (Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past)
Great Tapestries: the Web of History From the 12th to the 20th Century
Tapestries: The Great Twentieth Century Modernists
Demons, Yarns and Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists
Soudoba Holandska Tapiserie (Dutch Contemporary Tapestry)

Any new acquisitions?

The online journal Museum practice often publishes useful case-studies for curators on such subjects as exhibitions, lighting, conservation, and cultural politics, but it was a surprise to read in an article from 15 July 2010 that "the Henry Wellcome collection has not been added to for around 75 years". 75 years would take us back to 1935, presumably meaning around the time of Sir Henry Wellcome's death in 1936. If the author means that Henry S. Wellcome's personal collection has not been added to since his death, how could anyone add to that except the man himself? But if it refers to those collections which Wellcome created and left to posterity, and which are named after him today -- of which the Wellcome Library is one -- then, well … we must not believe everything we read in the press, even the quality professional press.

There are in fact dedicated web-pages on the Wellcome Library's website devoted to "Newly available items", of which all but the section headed "Retrospective cataloguing" actually consists of new additions to this part of "the Henry Wellcome collection". They record the steady stream of carefully selected items arriving in packages and cardboard boxes and tubes in Wellcome Library offices. The page devoted to iconographic documents such as prints, paintings, photographs and drawings lists the last three months' additions: at the time of writing there are fifty items on that page alone, and that's certainly not from the most prolific department. On that page the items acquired range in date from around 1700 to 2010, and come from Italy, Germany, Austria, France, Bangladesh and the UK.

Two items acquired in the last decade deserve special attention just now, because at the beginning of July 2010 they were put on permanent public display in the Wellcome Library for the first time -- not perpetual display, but continuous display for a few years. One (left) has already been mentioned in a posting on this blog: the portrait of Benjamin Jesty, the first vaccinator, which the Wellcome Library repatriated from South Africa where it had been preserved for many years by Jesty's descendants.

The other (above) is notable on several accounts. It is an eighteenth-century Dutch painting, which is a rarety in itself, since eighteenth-century paintings from the Netherlands are as rare in British collections as British portraits by artists of Dutch descent are common. This picture was painted, probably in Rotterdam, by the Prague-born painter Johannes Zacharias Simon Prey (1749-1822). It was found offered for sale, unframed and with no earlier provenance, in Antwerp by the dealer Rafael Valls who bought it there for the Wellcome Library.

The painting is an allegory, and like many allegories it is complex, but rewardingly so. There are three scenes, which are linked to each other. They start on the left, with the three people in ancient garb. They have the attributes of Apollo (the bow with which he, as the inventor of medicine, killed the Pythia), Aesculapius (his rod entwined by a single snake), and apparently hybrid features of Hippocrates, Galen and Celsus (a skull and syringe, and the Greek proverb "know thyself", the catchphrase for anatomy). This venerable group represents Traditional Western Medicine as it was preserved in the writings attributed to Hippocrates and Galen, was rediscovered in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and then formed the foundation of western academic medicine from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century.

In the second scene, in the foreground (illustration above), putti lay before these ancient sages a box of exotic riches and materia medica of the kind brought back from South Africa and the East Indies to Europe by the VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East-India Company), as well as imports from the colonies in Brazil: coral, elephant's tusk, exotic minerals and plants, and precious stones. The subject is similar to the one shown in this 18th-century print (image right): the Dutch fleet is shown below, while above are the putti presenting its cargo of materia medica to Apollo, Mercury and tutelary pagan deities. The effect of these discoveries on natural history, medicine and pharmacy is brilliantly illuminated in Harold J. Cook's award-winning book Matters of exchange: commerce, medicine, and science in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale 2007)

The third scene, on the right (image top), shows materia medica being turned into medicines in a chemical-pharmaceutical laboratory. On the left of this scene stands a man working a mortar and pestle. He looks out at the viewer, and his mortar is inscribed with the artist's name "Is. Prey": these are heavy hints that this is a self-portrait of Johannes Prey. The mortar bears the date 16 July 1791 ("17 - 7/16 - 91"), when Prey would have been aged 42 (click on image at top to enlarge). The laboratory scene shows "today", i.e. the summer of 1791; it is depicted in grey, almost grisaille, contrasting in colour with the Rubensian splendour of the ancient Greeks on the left.

One of the items on the steps in the foreground is a book containing two colour illustrations. The one on the left shows the head of the femur and the one on the right shows black and white squares. These have been identified by Dr Monique Kornell as two works by the printmaker Jan L' Admiral which were published in books by well-known Dutch authors in the 1730s (i.e. nearly sixty years previously). The black and white squares show the different skin colours of North Africans ("Ethiopians"): this is a plate to Bernhard Siegfried Albinus's De sede et causa coloris aethiopum et caeterorum hominum (Leiden 1737), and it is the sole plate to that book. The two squares show skin from the breast of a black woman and the lower image shows a "nail removed from her thumb", part of a discussion of the physical characteristics of racial types. The other illustration, showing the hip bone and top of the femur, was published in Frederik Ruysch's Icon membranae vasculosae (Leiden 1738). Both are colour mezzotints made by L' Admiral, the inventor of intaglio printing in colour, for two of the most illustrious scholars of the time in Holland, Albinus and Ruysch. The painter seems to have been remarkably well-informed about Dutch innovations in print-making techniques. He includes them as modern contributions to medical knowledge on a par with the discoveries in zoology and botany which the VOC had enabled through its arduous voyages of discovery.

So on the left of the painting we have what Prey depicts as the glorious tradition of western medicine (obviously differing from Professor David Wootton's view of it as thoroughly inglorious). In the foreground we have the results of the Dutch trading empire which has brought into Europe new materia medica that enriches and transforms that ancient learning, together with the new medical and anatomical knowledge created by such moderns such as Albinus (image left), Ruysch and L' Admiral. In the middle we have Prey recording this event in mid-July 1791. And on the right we have the drab world of "today" (1791 and after) in which the ingredients are transferred to a chemical laboratory and turned efficiently into medicines. The medicines are shown in jars on the back wall of the laboratory.

And as if that's not matter enough, there's the Rotterdam connection. And the significance of the marble steps on which the putti recline. And the patron or institution for which this painting might have been commissioned. And other points for which there is no time or space in this posting, and will have to await discussion elsewhere. The nuances are arguable, and there may be a significant source for the representation of the laboratory, but the above seems to give the gist of the work. The painting can now be seen in the Reading Room of the Wellcome Library if anyone wants to check any details for themselves. And if anyone has any other ideas about the interpretation of the picture, please add them as a Comment to this posting or send them to the Wellcome Library.

The date 1791 is literally at the centre of the painting and historically central to its significance: the midst of the French revolution in which so many old traditions were swept away in the intellectual world as much as in the political or architectural. Galen's vocabulary was found wanting and was replaced by new coinages such as Bichat's tissues; the work of Lavoisier on gases undermined the humours; and the Ancien Régime's dominance of physicians over surgeons could no longer be taken for granted. The painting is a retrospect on a great intellectual and practical tradition at a turning point in its transformation into something recognizable to some extent today.

No new additions to the Henry Wellcome collection? On the contrary, to discover works like the above, keep watching those rolling web pages (also available as RSS feeds) which record them as they come in! In fact it would be something of a scandal had there really been no new additions, as Sir Henry Wellcome (right) directed in his will that his estate should be used "for the purchase and acquisition of books, manuscripts, documents, pictures, and other works of art and other objects and things for [his] Research Museums or Libraries". The two paintings that have now been added to his collection and put on public display fulfil the terms of his bequest and would surely have delighted him.


Top and details: Oil painting by Johannes Zacharias Simon Prey, 16 July 1791. Wellcome Library no. 466059i
Apollo and the VOC fleet: Coloured engraving, 17--. Wellcome Library no. 93i
Black and white skin: Colour mezzotint to Dissertatio secunda de sede et caussa coloris Aethiopum et caeterorum hominum, Leiden 1737, Wellcome Library no. 5761091
Bernhard Siegfried Albinus: Mezzotint by J. J. Haid after C. de Moor. Wellcome Library no. 461i
Post-revolutionary doctors: Coloured lithograph by F-S. Delpech after Louis Boilly, 1823. Wellcome Library no. 16325i
Henry S. Wellcome: Bronze by G.F. Edgardo Simone, 1930. Wellcome Library no. 47277i

Tribulations of Father Bernardo

Etching by Jeremiasz Falck after Bernardo Strozzi. Wellcome Library no. 35207i

Bernardo Strozzi (1581-1644) of Genoa was a painter whose works include this portrayal of an old lady sitting at her dressing table, assisted by two slightly mocking younger women. One of the carers holds upright the heavily-framed mirror while the other sticks a feather in the lady's hair. Strozzi's oil painting of this subject is now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, but in the seventeenth century it was owned by the Reynst brothers in Amsterdam. There it was recorded in this etching attributed to the engraver Jeremiasz Falck (1619-1677) from Gdansk, who sometimes worked in Amsterdam [1].

Falck's print has been discussed as a representation of "the lustful old woman", a type identified in terms of humoral physiology [2]. Women's bodies were phlegmatic because they were cold and wet, whereas men's were choleric because they were hot and dry. In later life, women became either colder or drier, leading them to become "merry widows". While it would be anachronistic to label her "osteoporotic", how appropriate is it even to label her using terms from specialist medical books of her time? Let's come back to this question after considering the life of Bernardo Strozzi.

Strozzi had two occupations: he was both a professional painter and a Capuchin friar. In 1625-1626 this unusual combination brought him into the courts, where he was accused of conduct unbecoming his religious status. His main defense was that he was painting not to acquire riches –- the Capuchins were a mendicant order –- but to support yet a third role in his life, which was as breadwinner for his aged mother and his impoverished sister Ginetta.

An article published in January 2009 reveals new documents in the Genoa archives about Father Bernardo's complicated life [3]. They show that, four years after the trial, Strozzi was still trying to exculpate himself, for he arranged for four witnesses to testify for him before a notary on 8 May 1630. They testified that Bernardo, having obtained temporary exemption from his duties with the Capuchins, was in too poor a state of health to return to them, and still needed to support his relatives by painting.

The third and fourth witnesses were both physicians, and a paraphrase of the newly discovered documents follows. First, Giovanni Agostino Balbano, who had already given evidence for Bernardo in 1625-1626, now stated that he had known Reverend Father Bernardo and been his medical adviser for about 16 years, and had treated him in his infirmities, and knew that he was of weak constitution; that in entering a strict religious order he would not be able to persevere in it, and his life would be curtailed. Moreover he had been found to have an illness of the left leg in the form of a huge varicose vein which increased the gravity of his state of health. Moreover Balbano continued, Ginetta, the sister of Father Bernardo, had also long been in a very bad state of health, and was heading towards a chronic incurable wasting state (etica). He added that Ginetta (who was married, but to a husband who did not provide for her) had a son of four years old who was virtually blind.

Then in the evening the fourth and last witness testified: he was Giovanni Battista Schratino, Doctor of Arts and Medicine. He declared that he had visited Strozzi earlier that day, and found that he was troubled with a flux of phlegmatic and melancholy humours in the left thigh and leg, which was manifested in a lesion formed by a very large dilatation of the veins of the whole leg and part of the thigh, so that the limb was damaged by a sore which had not been cured. And if it was not cured, and particularly if greater exercise and movement occurred, it would cause many lesions, incurable ones at that, even more so if he entered a strict order like the Capuchins or similar, who go barefoot or wear rough shoes, that would accelerate the opening up of the sores with danger to his life, since he had a very delicate and weak constitution. And on the same day Dr Schratino said he had visited Bernardo's nephew who was four or five years old, and who was troubled by a disturbance of cold and wet humours in the head, with great weakness in the eyes which made him almost blind. Moreover, the boy's mother was unhealthy and was bleeding with distillation of humours from the brain (catarro), and was running a risk of becoming phthisic (another generic term for a wasting disease). Asked for the grounds of his evidence, he replied that he was a physician and a practitioner, and that that was the truth.

In this case we see traditional western medicine in action. Humoral practice really did exist outside the pages of vellum-bound tomes of Galen! Despite the evidence of the two doctors, the court was not sympathetic, for in 1631 Bernardo was sentenced to eighteen months' harsh confinement in the Capuchin convent in Genoa. However, in July 1633, while allowed out on compassionate leave to visit Ginetta, the Reverend Father did a runner and sought asylum in the rival republic of Venice. There the ex-friar Bernardo continued painting unhindered [4].

Between the trials of 1625-6 and these new witness statements of May 1630, mention of the painter's aged mother disappears. It was she who, many years before, had sent the boy Bernardo to train as a painter. She seems to have died in February 1630. Could she have been the old lady who was shown making up in front of her dressing table mirror – freed at last from the ebb and flow of humours, and the indignities of old age?

[1] Wellcome Library catalogue no. 35207i

[2] Anouk Janssen, Grijsaards in zwart-wit: de verbeelding van de ouderdom in de Nederlandse prentkunst (1550-1650), Zutphen 2007, p. 285, fig. 190 (the same print attributed to Theodoor Matham)

[3] Andaleeb Badiee Banta, 'Trials and tribulations: new documentary evidence for Bernardo Strozzi in Genoa', The Burlington magazine, January 2009: 14-18

[4] Ezia Gavazza et al., Bernardo Strozzi: Genova 1581/82-Venezia 1644, Milan 1995, p. 367.