Item of the month - May 2009

Back in March we highlighted a work by William Blades – The Enemies of Books. This single parchment leaf, Western MS.46, has had to deal with a number of threats included in Blades’ list - fire, water, ignorance and bigotry, and bookbinders, but to this list we might also add well-meaning librarians. Its hazardous journey began around the year 1000 A.D. when it was a blank leaf in a manuscript book probably part of an English monastic library. Some time in the early 11th century several different monks wrote down medical recipes on the blank leaf, not in Latin but in English.

The medical recipes are for treating heartache, lung disease, 'wenns' or tumours, and liver disease. Just a few hundred complete Anglo-Saxon manuscripts survive and only a very small number of these are scientific texts. The Old English Herbarium is a translation of the Latin Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius (British Library MS. Cotton Vitellius C III), the Lacnunga is a miscellaneous collection of medical texts (British Library MS. Harley 585) and Bald’s Leechbook is a medical text compiled in the 9th century (British Library MS. Royal 12 D.XVII). We don't know much about the recipes on our leaf and further research is still needed.

The leaf happily stayed in its volume for 500 years, until Henry VIII decided to close English monasteries and confiscate their property. Many manuscripts were destroyed, broken up to be used for lining boxes, hats and gloves and for bindings of new printed books. This leaf became the cover for a Latin school book printed in 1558 (Petrus Mosellanus, Tabulae de schematibus et tropis ). The book came into the collection of John, Lord Robartes (1606-1685) at Lanhydrock, Cornwall (ironically, an estate which had previously been owned by the Augustinian priory of St Petroc at Bodmin). And so another 300 years passed uneventfully for our parchment leaf, only troubled by dust and neglect, another of Blades’ enemies. Then, on 4 April 1881, the house was engulfed by fire. Miraculously the books survived, thrown out of the library windows.


Having survived the fire, the books were then to suffer at the hands of a well-meaning librarian, William Henry Allnutt, who was an assistant in the Bodleian Library. In the 1880s he was employed on a part time basis at Lanhydrock to reorder and catalogue the books and decided to remove many manuscript and printed fragments from their bindings. This leaf became part of a volume of manuscript fragments, labelled B.12.26, which was then sold to the Bodleian Library in 1963 (MS. Lat. Misc. b.17). However, a few years earlier several leaves were removed and sold separately. The Wellcome Library purchased this leaf at Sotheby’s in 1956. The printed school book remains in the library at Lanhydrock (shelfmark D.7.34), now in a 19th century binding. The estate is now managed by the National Trust.

There is a full description of Western MS.46, including a modern English translation of the recipes, in the archives database. If you would like to find out more about the Wellcome Library’s collection of manuscript and printed herbals, there will be an Insights talk ‘Healing Herbs’ on Thursday 4 June at 3pm. More information will be available soon on the Wellcome Collection website.

William Morris at the Wellcome Library

William Morris's library at Kelmscott House reflected his many interests. Although it contained many fine manuscripts and early printed books, it was primarily a working collection. Herbals were acquired both as source material for designs and for practical information on the uses of plants. His interest in reviving vegetable dyes led him to collect early dyeing manuals. He also acquired a comprehensive collection of works on Scandinavia and Northern Europe, particularly the Icelandic sagas. The foundation of the Kelmscott Press and his interest in book design and production resulted in the acquisition of both bibliographical reference works and examples of illuminated manuscripts and early printed books.

After Morris's death in 1896, his library was to be sold for the benefit of his widow and daughters, after they had made a limited selection. Possible purchasers included Charles Fairfax Murray and Mrs John Rylands but in the end the collection was bought by Richard Bennett, of Pendleton near Manchester. Bennett was a fastidious collector who, by and large, limited himself to manuscripts and 15th-century printed books and avoided volumes taller than 13 inches. He selected 31 manuscripts and 239 printed books from the Morris collection and put the rest up for auction at Sotheby’s in December 1898. In 1902 he sold his own collection, including his Morris acquisitions, to J. Pierpont Morgan, so that the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York now has the largest surviving remnant of Morris’s library.

The Sotheby’s sale, from 5th to 10th December 1898, caused a sensation. The 1215 lots realised £10,992.11.0. The illuminated manuscripts reached the highest prices and attracted the most press attention. Quaritch, as usual, was at the head of the field, laying out £3082.19.0 for 85 lots, followed by other leading dealers such as Leighton, Pickering & Chatto, and Tregaskis. Little notice was taken of the fact that over a third of the collection, 464 lots, went to a single bidder giving his name as Hal Wilton. This was Henry Wellcome’s preferred alias when buying at auction.

The Morris books were long ago dispersed through the collection and ceased to be a recognisable entity. After Sir Henry Wellcome’s death in 1936 the Wellcome Trustees were overwhelmed by the size and diversity of his museum and library and initiated a dispersal programme to focus the collection more specifically to the history of medicine. A series of 27 sales was held between 1937 and 1939, three of which consisted of library materials, and many of the Morris books must have been weeded out at this stage. The first library sale on 21st to 22nd March 1938 contains a section of fourteen 16th century books specified as from the Morris collection. In 1945 a bulk sale to Dawsons included ten of the eleven Morris manuscripts and doubtless more printed books.

Using the library’s original copy of the Sotheby’s sale catalogue (pictured above), we have identified 198 printed books, including 67 incunabula, and one 15th century manuscript, still held in our collection.

The books are now all identified in the Wellcome Library catalogue.

Author: Julianne Simpson

Unflowering fuchsia: the date of "No walk today"

"No walk today" by Sophie Anderson is a classic of Victorian genre painting, but it has not always been appreciated. The painting's last owner paid only 14 guineas for it after it had failed to reach its reserve of 15 guineas at auction. That auction was held about 1926 in the London rooms of Robinson, Fisher & Harding (a firm much frequented by Henry S. Wellcome), and the buyer was the Foreign Office official David (later Sir David) Montagu Douglas Scott (1887-1986).

As a lover of both Victorian art and gardening, Sir David particularly admired the precision with which the painter had indicated the time of year (July) through the flowers—jasmine in bloom, fuchsia not yet in bloom. After Sir David died at the age of 99, his pictures passed to his widow, and after her death they were sold by Sotheby's to benefit the Finnis Scott Foundation. Sotheby's sale on 19 November 2008 was accompanied by a huge and scholarly catalogue enlivened with photographs of the Scotts' home showing the paintings hanging in corridors, kitchens and sitting rooms, with perceptive hand-written labels stuck to the walls.

"No walk today" is reproduced in standard works on Victorian art and has been lent to several exhibitions, including the Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition in Washington, DC, in 1985. Its subject is the disappointment of a little girl dressed up for a walk which has been cancelled because of rain. Through the window dripping with raindrops we can see that her costume includes some of the very worst materials to wear in wet weather: velvet, ostrich feathers, silk and lace. If her family had the money to dress her up like that, couldn't they have afforded to give her an umbrella or a waterproof coat? The latter rather depends on the date. It was one thing to have the idea of mixing rubber with cloth, as Charles Macintosh did; it was quite another to turn the results into something pleasant to wear, and the technology of waterproof clothing was gradually adapted to the aesthetics of costume throughout the century. But even a macintosh could not protect against cold and wet miasmas which might engender, especially in children, a fever leading to lethal pneumonia.

In any case, what exactly is the date of "No walk today"? It bears no date, but the back is inscribed with the artist's address, 21 Merton Road, Kensington. Sotheby's say "The picture was presumably painted in the late 1850s as Anderson had moved to Lincoln's Inn Fields by 1863. The work's early history is not known."

There is in fact an early document for "No walk today", which suggests a date for its creation.
The Wellcome Library has a print of the painting, lettered with the title "No walk today" and the credit line:
Photographed by Lebbeus Colls from a painting by Mrs Anderson. Engraved on copper by voltaic electricity & printed in the ordinary manner. Published March 1857 by the Photo-Galvano-Graphic Comp.y .

There is also a series statement: Photographic art treasures
(To read the original lettering, please click on the image.)

What does all this mean? It means that this is one of a small number of prints made in London by "a very delicate and complicated process … ambitiously far ahead of its time", patented in 1854 and called photogalvanography by its Austrian inventor, Paul Pretsch [1]. Pretsch, who came to London in 1851 to see the Great Exhibition, was one in a long line of people who wrestled with the problem of turning a tonal image such as a watercolour or photograph into something that the printing press could print [2]. In his process, the image was projected from a negative on to gelatin, and thence replicated on a copper plate by a process using electrolysis (described in the print as "voltaic electricity"). The small number of prints using this process presumably follows from the difficulty of making the plate. Pretsch started the "Photographic art treasures" in December 1856. If this "photogalvanograph" was published in March 1857, and the painting was started at the season identified by Sir David from the unflowering fuchsia, the painting must have been painted between July 1856 and March 1857.

The photographer is named as Lebbeus Colls. He was a London art dealer already in business in New Bond Street by 1852, and was also an early photographer. In both activities he was sometimes associated with his brother, the painter Richard Colls, one of many people sued by Henry Fox Talbot over photographic patents. It is striking that within a year of its production Sophie Anderson's painting was already being described as an "art treasure". Present day opinion agrees, for in 2008 "No walk today" fetched the highest price in the David Scott sale: £1,038,050 (including the buyer's premium). Even after the lapse of 82 years, that must be a good return on a painting bought for 14 guineas.

[1] Bamber Gascoigne, How to identify prints, London 1986, chapter 36

[2] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fotogalvanografie