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| Drawing by Pierre Chasselat. Wellcome Library no. 729420i |
The identity was clinched by the discovery of a rare engraving (Bibliothèque Nationale de France) of the head and shoulders of our sitter, which was copied from the Wellcome Library's drawing and was published as a portrait of Ange-Bernard Imbert-Delonnes in his lifetime.
The drawing shows the lordly figure of Imbert-Delonnes sitting in his study surrounded by mementos of his professional life. In the left background is his scholarly library presided over by a statue of Aesculapius (left). Above right is a portrait of his surgical role-model Ambroise Paré (1510-1590), while a volume of Paré's works is seen in the lower left corner. That volume leans against another portrait, of a man disfigured by tumours: he was a star patient of Imbert-Delonnes, Périer de Gurat, portrayed for Imbert-Delonnes by Joseph Boze the evening before the operation in which Imbert-Delonnes removed the tumours. On the far right, in a belljar, is a colossal tumour removed controversially from another prominent patient, Charles Delacroix (1741-1805); and neoclassical furniture, about which more is still being discovered. The highlights of white gouache applied to the rendering of the chair represent the hardness and smartness of these magnificent ebony or mahogany surfaces.
The photograph above, dated 1931, portrays the cardiologist Edward Franklin Bland. Born in Virginia in 1901, Bland spent most of his career at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), where he was an Intern, House Officer, Cardiac Fellow, and finally in 1949 Chief of Cardiology, a post he held until his retirement in 1964. The photograph was kindly presented to the Wellcome Library by Dr Arthur Hollman FRCP, the biographer of Sir Thomas Lewis: Dr Hollman had acquired it as a result of the fact that in 1930 Bland had spent a year on research in Lewis's laboratory at University College Hospital (UCH) in London. [1]
Today, he is probably the only transplant surgeon whose name is widely known, yet when experts talk about the history of transplantation, names of other great figures tend to be mentioned, such as Norman Shumway, Roy Calne, Thomas E. Starzl, and Denton A. Cooley. These worked in international centres of surgical research such as Stanford University in California; Houston, Texas; or Cambridge, England — while the man who beat them to the goal and outshone them all in the public mind was apparently a relative outsider: Barnard, working at the University of Cape Town (above) under the pressures of the apartheid regime of the time. How did that happen? 
The history of the Knights of Malta (Knights of Rhodes, Knights Hospitallers, Knights of St John) was one of the interests of the founder of the Wellcome Library, Henry S. Wellcome. He acquired a substantial archive of their papers in Paris in 1933 (subsequently returned to Malta), and several iconographic documents, most notably this painting by Antoine de Favray. In recent years the Knights have focused their medical activities on specific fields such as refugees, people with leprosy, and – most conspicuous in Great Britain -- emergency services: their British outcrop St John's Ambulance is a familiar presence at crowded events such as football matches, gigs and royal weddings.
Left: Robert Gooch by John Linnell, 1831. Wellcome Library no. 3701i
Later state:
On 25 October 1760, the British King George II died and his 22-year old grandson George William Frederick, previously Prince of Wales, became "His most Sacred Majesty George the IIId, King of Great Britain &c." (left). Looking back from today's vantage-point exactly 250 years later, George III's long reign, starting on that October day in 1760 and extending sixty years to his death in 1820, has left many marks on our everyday life. The defining events of his reign include American independence; long wars against France under the Ancien Régime, the Revolution and the Empire; and the decline of the power of the monarch. At home, he presided over turbulent political divisions between the Whigs personified by Charles James Fox and the Tories under William Pitt the younger; acrimonious divisions in his own family, in which his regent and successor the Prince of Wales pursued policies antagonistic to the king; and the complete transformation of the country's agriculture, sciences, industry and arts, exemplified by his founding of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. Policies which he declined to follow cast a long shadow: reform of the government of India, banning of the slave trade, and Catholic emancipation.
There are many representations of the king in the Wellcome Library. Among several intimate portraits which focus on the king as a person, the mezzotint from a portrait by Thomas Frye shown above (top: Wellcome Library no. 25552i) portrays him in 1762, two years after his accession: squared up for transfer, it would be suitable as a model for an inn-sign of the King's Head. If we wish to test its accuracy against an independent control, we can compare it with this etching after a rapid sketch by Nathaniel Dance (1735-1811): the basic physiognomy is the same, though being drawn some thirty eventful years later, demonstrates the rejuvenation that tends to be involved in royal, but not only royal, portraiture.
King George III suffered several extended periods of illness involving mental breakdown, the first being in 1765 when he described himself as "a mind ulcer'd by the treatment it meets with from all around". Another lasted from the summer of 1788 to the spring of 1789. To celebrate his recovery in 1789 two prints shown here were published.
However, George III had plenty to agitate his mind during his career. The King of France was guillotined in 1793, and in the previous year Gustaf III, King of Sweden, had been assassinated by his political opponents. In this caricature by James Gillray, the King and Queen Charlotte are disturbed at their toilet when William Pitt rushes in to bring "news from Sweeden": "Another monarch done over!". The horrified King stammers: "What? Shot? What? What? What? Shot! Shot! Shot!", showing the habit of repeating words in rapid succession which features memorably in Alan Bennett's play as a sign of the King's recovery of his personality.
Further episodes of mental disturbance occurred in 1801 and 1804. The king's fiftieth anniversary was celebrated on 25 October 1810 with a reception at Windsor, but it seems to have precipitated the insanity which persisted until the end of his life. After this date the king was in confinement: the portraits were presumably either speculative or based on existing portraits. Two from this period show him as a King Lear-like figure, blind, bearded and lost to the world: one by Charles Turner, the other possibly by John Jackson: the latter (right) was published as a mezzotint immediately after his death on 29 January 1820. It was "published by His Majesty's most gracious permission": that must mean George IV.
Right: mezzotint by S.W. Reynolds, 24 February 1820. Wellcome Library no. 569597i
One of the last from-the-life portraits to be published must be this aquatint (above) by Charles Rosenberg, dated 1812 and showing the king standing in a pavilion at Cheltenham holding a glass of Cheltenham Spa water. It may have been drawn during an earlier visit to Cheltenham in 1788.
"Mental: a history of the madhouse" was a 60-minute television documentary in the BBC Four/Open University "Out of Mind" Season, broadcast in the UK in May 2010. [1] It told the story of the closure of Britain's mental asylums. To quote the press release, "In the post-war period, 150,000 people were hidden away in 120 of these vast Victorian institutions all across the country. Today, most mental patients, or service users as they are now called, live out in the community and the asylums have all but disappeared. Through powerful testimonies from patients, nurses and doctors, the film explores this seismic revolution and what it tells us about society's changing attitudes to mental illness over the last sixty years." Powerful? Overwhelming.
The Wellcome Library has a large drawing made by an artist in High Royds in 2003-2004 as part of the ritual commemorations that were felt to be required at the time of its decommissioning. It looks like drawings done by patients to describe their gloomy life in the asylum. In fact, as film of the High Royds corridors showed, the drawing is merely an atmospheric representation of the actual interior in which patients spent their "empty and repetitive asylum life". There was a "quasi-prison atmosphere" (Dr Rollin again). The film-makers found articulate people who were able and willing to describe their experiences at High Royds and other asylums, whether as patients or as staff. These interviews are priceless.
The film-makers were careful not to make High Royds seem like a scapegoat: after describing episodes of brutality towards patients, the commentary stated that there was "no evidence of this kind of treatment at High Royds" which on the contrary was "in the forefront of the drugs revolution" in therapy. Some of the reminiscences on the High Royds website are quite complimentary, though others, it must be said, recall much unpleasantness. Other asylums in Newcastle, Sussex and Buckinghamshire also featured in the narrative, often with superb historic film footage.
The film showed the long process leading to the closure of the asylums. The first real "breaking point with the Victorian period" (Barham) was the 1959 Mental Health Act. Dame Pat Hornsby Smith MP called for "sympathy and understanding" to be the principles underlying treatment of the mentally ill. In 1961 Enoch Powell as Minister of Health 1960-1963 started a war on the asylums with a remarkable speech seizing on the image of the "looming water-tower and chimney combined" as the emblem of the asylum. Powell urged "the elimination of by far the greater part of this country's mental hospitals as they are today". He lost battles but won the war when Care in the Community was introduced. But Dr Rollin was no happier about the new arrangements than about the bad old days of the asylum. "The whole concept of Community Care is a disaster: I don't think the community cares" (NIMBYism was one of the problems he had in mind).
Mental illness is always with us, but individuals and institutions can be better than the film's account of what was offered in the asylum regime that Powell and others deplored. Last month I visited Bethlem Hospital to see an exhibition of a suite of portrait prints of patients and doctors at the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospitals in south London. 
Bethlem Royal Hospital is now in the London Borough of Bromley, and is approached by Monks Orchard Road, a leafy avenue with fine large houses down one side and the hospital's extensive grounds on the other, shielded by attractive woods and shrubberies. Inside the hospital grounds, as open as any ordinary hospital, one almost seems to be arriving at a National Trust country house: there's the chapel, there's the main house, where's the old stable block for cream teas?
On the other side of a meadow of wild flowers is a low building marked as The Bethlem Gallery, where the exhibition had been installed. (Note, behind the gallery, even here is the inevitable "looming" water-tower.) Most of the other people there are staff, and talking to them, it is striking how many of them are aware of the hospital's infamous history in formidable and less therapeutic buildings, first in Robert Hooke's palazzo in Finsbury (1676-1815: below left) and later in the building that now, shorn of its wings, houses the Imperial War Museum (1815-1930: below right). They appreciate the present environment of the hospital, and it is hard to believe the patients do not do so too, at least those in convalescent mode.
Two views of Bethlem: above left, drawing by Thomas Rowlandson, 1789; above right, coloured aquatint, 1817. Wellcome Library nos. 536228i and 39200i.
Access to the Gallery and to occupational art-activities is provided. The portraits on show in the Gallery are colour etchings by Gemma Anderson, a talented artist from Northern Ireland who trained in printmaking in London at the Royal College of Art. The artist is present (right), and it is touching to see her talking to a former patient, "Frederick", who sat to her for his portrait (below). In the clear light of the white-walled gallery, the etchings are beautifully exhibited in frames, each one a finely wrought tribute to an individual person.
So striking are the portraits, and so unusual, that the Wellcome Library has bought the sixteen prints that form the complete set Portraits: patients and psychiatrists. They mark a new step in psychiatric portraiture that mirrors the transition from the closed asylums of the past to the hope for a better present and future. They deserve a notice of their own, if not more than one: watch this space.
[1] Director: Chris Boulding. Producer: Adam Jessel. Executive Producer: Denys Blakeway. Archive Researcher: Peter Scott, for Blakeway Productions. No longer available on television but the Wellcome Library has a DVD of it.
However, the fine detail of this account is corrected by the Oxford dictionary of national biography, and by Mannings himself in his entry for another portrait of Mrs Seaforth in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight (Mannings p. 408 no. 1595). From this it emerges that Barwell married as his second wife on 24 June 1785 Catherine (1769-1847), the daughter of Nathaniel Coffin from Boston, Massachusetts, and his wife, Elizabeth. Mrs Seaforth (Rebecca Lyne, who took the name of Seaforth) was the mistress of Barwell by whom she had three girls and a boy. So while Barwell did have a "child bride", it was the sixteen-year old Catherine Coffin rather than his mistress Rebecca Seaforth, the latter being the model for Tuccia.
Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André TimothéeREQUIESCAT IN PACE
Spy: his cloak-and-dagger activity in a world of smoke and mirrors would have baffled George Smiley. He practised this trade in Russia, France and England.
Soldier: being trampled by a troop of cavalry in the Seven Years' War may have left him unhinged, but he could still outwit the Prussians.
Person of two genders: the French government under Louis XVI insisted he wear female dress in compliance with his unreliable statement that he was a woman.
Blackmailer and whistleblower: having been employed by a secret branch of the French diplomatic service run by Louis XV to spy in London on the public branch run by Madame de Pompadour, he used his ownership of the secret papers to persuade the French government to pay off his debts; specifically, papers setting out plans for a French invasion of the British Isles.
Inventor and collector of secret remedies: his unpublished compilation of inventions and remedies resides in the Wellcome Library.
Fencer, entertainer, bibliophile, and more besides …
Top: mezzotint of the Chevalier D'Éon as a man, 1764, either by Victor Vispré or by his brother François Xavier Vispré, both Huguenot artists active in France, Ireland and England. Wellcome Library no. 274i
Above left: the Chevalier D'Éon as a woman. Engraving by R. Cooper after J. Condé, 1810. Wellcome Library no. 277i The stipple technique was considered appropriate for boudoir, sentimental and feminine subjects.
Right: the Chevalier D'Éon as a woman and as a man. Etching, 1777. Wellcome Library no. 275i
Below: the Chevalier D'Éon's collection of inventions and remedies. Wellcome Library MS.2100. Click on image to enlarge. Note bottom right: "What is the most up-to-date book on English cuisine?"
"S'adresser à Mlle. D'Eon No. 38 Brewer Street Golden Square."
Eugénie was a Spanish countess whose mother was of Scottish and Belgian parentage. In 1853 she married Napoleon III. He had lived in various places (on Lake Constance in Switzerland; Leamington Spa, Warwickshire; Southport, Lancashire; New York City) before returning to France in 1848 to take up the presidency and in 1852 the Imperial throne.
Right: The empress Eugénie in Paris. Engraving by D.J. Pound. Wellcome Library.
Napoleon III's reign was eventful. He provoked the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, only to end up losing it and himself a prisoner of war after being captured at the battle of Sedan. He returned to England and settled with his wife at Chislehurst in Kent. There they lived with their son, Napoleon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph Bonaparte, the Prince Imperial, who had been born in 1856. It was at Chislehurst that Napoleon III died in 1873, weakened by a sequence of three surgical operations performed in an attempt to break up a huge bladder stone.
Left: the Prince Imperial Louis Napoleon. Wood engraving, 1879. Wellcome Library no. 580028i
The exiled Eugénie was not so fortunate in the career of her son, Prince Louis Napoleon, as Helena had been in the support of her son, Constantine. Louis Napoleon joined the British army and was keen to see action in the Zulu War. On 1 June 1879 he took part in an expedition outside the camp. He and his party were ambushed by some forty Zulu: most of the other soldiers got away, but the Prince Imperial was unlucky. His dead body was discovered the following morning riddled with spear wounds.
The reaction around the world was comparable (mutatis mutandis) to the shock at the death of Diana Princess of Wales in 1997. Eugénie was of course devastated. In 1880 she went to South Africa to visit the spot where he had been killed.
On her return to England she left Chislehurst and moved to Farnborough in Hampshire, where her remains of her son's body were interred with his father. There she involved herself in good causes, including women's suffrage, improving the treatment of young offenders, and children's charities, as well as radio, electrification, motor cars, her complicated family relationships, and a close friendship with the Queen. In World War I she turned a wing of her house into a convalescent home for wounded soldiers.
Right: the Empress Eugénie mourning her late son the Prince Imperial. Colour lithograph by F. Betbeder, 1879. Wellcome Library no. 575546i
Among her many possessions was the icon of Helena and Constantine which is now in the Wellcome Library. In gazing on the likeness of her fellow-empress, Eugénie could recognize in several respects a kindred spirit. The island named after St Helena, to which her husband's uncle Napoleon I had been exiled, was often in her thoughts: violets from the island decorated her sitting room. Eugénie was also linked with Helena through the True Cross, for Eugénie was the guardian of a relic believed to be a fragment of the Cross which Helena had excavated. This sliver of wood, glazed with a pale green gemstone and housed with other relics in a Gothic iron chasse, was believed to have been buried with Charlemagne; the Emperor Charles V had had it placed in the treasury at Aachen, from which it passed to Napoleon I and thence through his step-daughter Hortense de Beauharnais to Eugénie. It was the only item which Eugénie had managed to save from the Tuileries when she was forced to flee the howling mob surrounding the palace on 4 September 1870, and it received an honoured place in the chapel at Farnborough Hill. Through a continuous line of individuals and families, from Jerusalem to Byzantium, from the first Holy Roman Emperor in Aachen to the Empress of the French in the rolling Hampshire countryside, "westward the course of Empire takes its way", in Berkeley's words.
On the other hand, the sight of Helena standing side by side with her son could arouse more melancholy thoughts. Unlike Constantine, Eugénie's son never succeeded his father as Emperor. Unlike Helena, Eugénie herself was never restored to her former imperial glory. The icon reassured because it represented a fond ideal to be cherished, rather than the sorrowful reality. And just as the icon commemorated Helena and Constantine long after their deaths, so perhaps Eugénie and her son would be remembered in centuries to come. That certainly seems to be the intention of the person who placed the icon in a box lettered "La belle fleur de mémoire". And, as we read about them here, we cultivate that flower of remembrance.
A note on the provenance
The box (above left and right) is inscribed and is accompanied by a letter from Mr Norman H. Greatorex, 13 The Hostel, Newburn Street, London S.E. 11, offering the painting to Queen Mary, consort of King George V of the United Kingdom. The letter states "These belonged to the Empress Eugénie & came from Farnborough Hill after she died there. I bought them at Guildford for 10/-". A letter to Mr Greatorex from a Lady in Waiting declined the gift "as the Queen does not collect icons". "These" in the the letter presumably refers to the painting and the box.
Acknowledgments:
Agnes Carey, Empress Eugénie in exile, New York: Century Co., 1920
Anne L McClanan, Representations of early Byzantine empresses: image and empire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002
William Smith, Eugénie, impératrice des Français, Paris: Bartillat, 1998
William Smith, The Empress Eugénie and Farnborough, Winchester: Hampshire County Council, 2001
News of a pair of forthcoming public events, which draw on the expertise and skills of two members of Wellcome Library staff.
These two paintings are part of an archive of Georgian paintings and drawings which appear to come from Leeds. Works from this old Yorkshire collection have been appearing in dribs and drabs, from several different dealers, since 2004. This pair of portraits was among the first works from the collection to have been acquired by the Wellcome Library.
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