Painting with Fire

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object

Matthew C. Hunter

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226390390
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

Painting with Fire shows how experiments with chemicals known to change visibly over the course of time transformed British pictorial arts of the long eighteenth century—and how they can alter our conceptions of photography today. As early as the 1670s, experimental philosophers at the Royal Society of London had studied the visual effects of dynamic combustibles. By the 1770s, chemical volatility became central to the ambitious paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, premier portraitist and first president of Britain's Royal Academy of Arts. Valued by some critics for changing in time (and thus, for prompting intellectual reflection on the nature of time), Reynolds's unstable chemistry also prompted new techniques of chemical replication among Matthew Boulton, James Watt, and other leading industrialists. In turn, those replicas of chemically decaying academic paintings were rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century and claimed as origin points in the history of photography.Tracing the long arc of chemically produced and reproduced art from the 1670s through the 1860s, the book reconsiders early photography by situating it in relationship to Reynolds's replicated paintings and the literal engines of British industry. By following the chemicals, Painting with Fire remaps familiar stories about academic painting and pictorial experiment amid the industrialization of chemical knowledge.

1

“Pictures . . . in time petrify’d”

Esther swoons. She collapses sidelong into the scarlet arms of a female attendant (plate 3). As she falls, the backs of her fingers brush the cinched splendor of iridescent green velvet that carpets the steps to her husband’s throne. Made moot by her insensibility, the attractions of those lustrous surfaces are turned outward to the beholder. They are slowed—magnified—as the drag of her cape’s flushed-gold lining drapes over that emerald step, replaying her fingers’ movement at amplified volume. Rising from his seat above, Persian king Ahasuerus leans forward. Right arm wriggling with agitation, his looming body casts shadow onto the crush of courtiers who crowd forward to see protocol and, now, posture broken. According to the biblical story, Esther had concealed her Jewish identity from her husband. Learning of a plot to massacre the Jews hatched by royal minister Haman (who contorts at upper left), she violates taboo by entering Ahasuerus’s throne room unbidden, only to faint in the act. The picture bristles with luminous cues—pearly dots crossing at Esther’s waist, glints of light off lolling eyes at upper right, the receding floor tiles’ pasty whites—to draw the beholder to its own centripetal insentience. The beholder is guided by lights as Esther blacks out.

Painted on canvas in the later 1540s, Tintoretto’s vision of Esther’s faint anticipates its own fate unknowingly. In the spring of 1628, the picture was packed into the London ship Margaret, which set sail from Venice, homeward-bound, on April 15. The ship contained a prodigious prize: a collection of paintings by Raphael, Titian, and other Renaissance masters. Valued at some fifteen thousand pounds sterling (equivalent to the cost of a disastrous naval siege operation then being run against the French at Île de Ré) and bought at perhaps twice that sum, Tintoretto’s Esther and other artworks had been acquired from the bankrupt Gonzaga family of Mantua. In Venice, they were crated for travel under the supervision of courtier Nicholas Lanier, acting on behalf of the purchaser, British king Charles I.1

The Margaret docked at Antwerp in mid-June. There, her cargo was found to be in satisfactory condition by Lanier, who had traveled overland through Switzerland and France to intercept the ship. But an unpleasant surprise awaited when the crates were unloaded in London one month later. As recounted by royal physician and connoisseur Sir Theodore de Mayerne (1573–ca. 1655), the Margaret had been packed at Venice with cargo that included not only fine art, but a load of currants and several barrels of mercury sublimate (a white salt used to treat venereal disease, among other applications). In the fetid depths of the ship’s hold, those incongruous components had come together to disfiguring effect. Some blamed a storm that rocked fishing boats in the Gulf of Venice soon after the Margaret’s departure. Mayerne focused on a vapor excited by the heated currants that blackened the precious paintings, turning them as dark as ink.2

Practical means for pictorial restitution were to hand, however. Recording that the king’s oil pictures had been successfully restored by washes of milk, Mayerne went on to recommend a graduated scale of interventions, from modest care with egg yolks and white Venetian soap to sterner salves. Aqua fortis (nitric acid), a preparation made with salt and alum, various sulphuric acids: all had their uses.3 Although it is unclear if or how Tintoretto’s Esther was then treated, the doubled presence of Haman now visible in the picture (he appears both as the figure in purple and as a ghostly apparition closer in to the leaning king) betrays the extensive reconstruction enacted upon it.4 Should pictures be defaced by vapors still stronger than the pong of putrefying currants that besmirched Charles’s paintings, Mayerne could recommend a solution made from salt and sulphur (two thirds of the tria prima promoted by Paracelsus von Hohenheim). “Like goes with like,” he reasoned.5

Auctioned off by Parliament after Charles I’s execution in 1649, Tintoretto’s Esther was bought back by his son Charles II following the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. So too was Mayerne’s research rediscovered by Restoration-era philosophers at the Royal Society of London, later seventeenth-century England’s leading learned institution. With the onset of London’s devastating plague in the spring of 1665, the Royal Society read extracts from Mayerne’s writings on the growth of worms in human teeth and gums, along with a recipe for salting beef.6 Their conversation ranging widely in July 1668 between vegetal saps’ circulation and the role of iron in the production of copper salts, the Society was referred to “certain papers about chemistry . . . from Sir Theodore Mayerne,” documents then turned over to a chemical subcommittee. Dyeing and coloring in the late 1660s, fermentations of ale by 1679, mixtures of metals in 1680, the staining of agates in 1681: all entered experimentalists’ conversations from Mayerne’s papers.7

On the face of it, the Royal Society’s regard for Mayerne—patron of Peter Paul Rubens, confrere of Anthony Van Dyck, artistic advisor to Stuart princes—as a repository of chemical lore would confirm the darkest suspicions of an older historiography. “A genuine taste for art did not exist among the English virtuosi of the seventeenth century,” as literary critic Walter Houghton once claimed. “On the contrary, they looked at painting in the same way they looked not only at coins, but even at nature and mechanical inventions.”8 This chapter proceeds from the proposition that Mayerne’s plotting of pictorial volatility amid expansive research bearing on living bodies and metallic transformations is tactically instructive for a history of temporally evolving chemical objects. For where the restitution of darkened pictures by chemical means had attracted Mayerne’s interest in the early Stuart era, fine art made to bear an unearthly, chemical glow became a subject of the Royal Society’s investigations in the later 1670s. Those spectacular experiments too looked back in time, to trials by Bolognese craftsman Vincenzo Cascariolo in the years around 1603. Mythically pursuing the philosopher’s stone, Cascariolo had then developed a method for calcining or roasting local stone to a fine powder. Exposed to sunlight, Cascariolo’s “Bononian stone,” or Bolognese phosphorus, could store and return illumination in the darkness. By the mid-1670s, competing chemical preparations using other materials (frequently human urine and feces) were not only being parlayed across Europe but were being physically applied to art and other sensitive surfaces.9 From Bologna, physician Marcello Malpighi reported how beholders could witness the art of a local collector appliqued with “the Bononian Stone calcined, [to see] Statues and Pictures variously shining in the dark.”10 In London, experimentalist Robert Hooke possessed his own recipe for making “Figures and Representations with this Light, as if often done . . . shine like the Stone.”11

Contrary to hopes raised by art-historical interest in shine and gleam, phosphorescent glow made but a modest visible mark upon Restoration London’s fledgling artistic cultures.12 We possess no contemporaneous depictions of British phosphorus experiments; what artifacts do survive give little to see on account of the volatile preparations’ time-sensitive effects. Yet, as expressed supremely by Joseph Wright of Derby’s The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorous, and prays for the Successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers (first exhibited in 1771), “cold fire” would become an important catalyst in the subsequent form and fabric of British picture-making (see plate 8). Known to and imaginatively replayed by Enlightenment-era makers, Restoration-era phosphorus research opens a history of temporally evolving chemical objects, as it were, before the era of British art.13

To enter that story, this chapter uses three operatives and a counterpoint. Meet the agents: Thomas Willis (1621–1675), Royalist physician and anatomist; Robert Boyle (1627–1691), chymist and natural philosopher, as well as one of the wealthiest men in Europe; and Robert Hooke (1635–1703), former assistant to both Willis and Boyle, who served in the late 1670s as the Royal Society’s powerful secretary. All three were practitioners of what historian of science Robert G. Frank Jr. has called the “physiological tradition” of natural philosophy that emerged from Civil War–era Oxford in the long shadow cast by William Harvey (1578–1657).14 Habitués of Oxford’s evolving philosophical clubs, Willis, Boyle, and Hooke all became fellows of the Royal Society and prominent, international exponents of the “new science” of experiment. Refracting trans-European interest in artificial phosphorus through these English protagonists, this chapter foregrounds how chemical materials changing visibly in time (and modeling the nature of time thereby) moved with research bearing on questions of light, life, and fire. It maps chemical connections between ephemeral pictures, bodies, and combustion, bonds that Enlightenment-era makers would subsequently root to seventeenth-century phosphorus research.15

The chapter also implants a methodological operation key to the book writ large, and takes a cue from Tintoretto’s Esther in doing so.16 Overcome, Esther loses sentience and collapses to the floor, no longer able to see. So too would many chemical processes made and used by Enlightenment practitioners leave little for the art historian to apprehend visually. All too often, there is no figure to square with the chemical grounds under experimental investigation. Yet Esther’s fall from upright sight into horizontal blindness can also guide us into the elemental; it can take us from the vertical picture plane to the chemical beds, baths, and other real but invisible agents subtending visibility. Equally, by following the chemicals binding life to combustion and the time of clocks to transitory visual effects, we can reroute artificial-phosphorus research in the Royal Society circa 1680 away from available endpoints in the history of photography. The chapter concludes on that historiographical juncture, prompted by the countervailing, period voice of physician-experimentalist Nehemiah Grew (bap. 1641–1712), as it passes into its own recursive tale.

Shining

In early April 1676, Somerset virtuoso John Beale had a fat pig slaughtered for a family meal. The pig was gutted. The intestines were boiled with its feet and the chitterlings kept in a briny solution in a cool, dark larder. On the fourth night of their submersion, a strange light was seen in the darkness. “All those parts of the guts, and the claws of the feet, which floated on the top of the pickle, began to shine,” Beale reported, “and the parts immersed under water gave no light; the light increased daily in all the parts that floated.” Some ten days after the pig had been killed, the light “seem’d as bright as the brightest Moon-shine.” A hand dipped into the transformed liquid would retain its weird glow.17 By the start of April’s third week, the light had vanished entirely. Beale was nothing if not modest about the interpretation he could offer for such fleeting phenomena. Only had he been moved to publication, he insisted, by the precedent of Robert Boyle, author of writings on a neck of mutton that shone with a greenish-blue light sufficient for reading at night from the pages of Henry Oldenburg’s Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London—the very journal to which Beale submitted his findings.18 In Beale’s estimate, such matters awaited treatment by “Expert Chymists . . . [who] deal with such fickle agents, as Fire and Flame.”19

Beale’s wish quickly came true. By the mid-1670s, several streams of research gathered around experiments with heatless substances capable of yielding light. Adept Johann Daniel Krafft demonstrated one such marvelous material at Boyle’s London laboratory in September 1677.20 Extracting a luminous, smoking preparation from a glass vial, Krafft scattered tiny fragments “without any order about the Carpet, where it was very delightful to see how vividly they shined; . . . they seemed like fixt Stars of the sixth or least magnitude, but twinkled also like them.” Not content at representing nature’s heavens, Krafft then turned his phosphorescent means upon the human arts. “Calling for a sheet of Paper and taking some of the stuff upon the tip of his finger,” the chemist “writ in large Characters two or three words, whereof one being DOMINI . . . shone so briskly and lookt so oddly, that the sight was extreamly pleasing, having in it a mixture of strangeness, beauty and frightfulness.”21 In a commensurate trial then being made across Europe, a preparation that would “not offend a Ladies hand” was applied to a visage (likely Boyle’s), an act that “made not only his own Face to shine, but the lustre of his Face discovered three or four other faces not far distant.”22

Why did the flickering sparks, flashes, and fumes of artificial phosphorus command such interest in philosophical circles circa 1680? Historians of science have proposed several plausible explanations. Made from bodily wastes, phosphorus promised an imminent realization of chymistry’s claims to ameliorate human health. “The cold fire, w...