Abstract
This essay re-examines the connections between connoisseurship and anatomical knowledge in the works of the elite medics of eighteenth-century Britain. These medics, including Richard Mead and William Cheselden, were known both for their medical innovations and for their commitment to the practices of connoisseurship—the collection and criticism of fine art objects. The essay discusses the making, presentation and reception of one such object—the Osteographia (1733), a luxurious anatomical atlas produced by the famous surgeon William Cheselden and sharply criticized by another surgeon, John Douglas. Focusing on how these two surgeons engaged with the aesthetic and material qualities of the book, Wragge-Morley identifies hitherto overlooked connections between the much-contested discourses and practices of medical knowledge and connoisseurship.
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Notes
- 1.
J. Stolnitz, ‘On the Origins of “Aesthetic Disinterestedness”’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20:2 (1961), 131–143, on 131–2.
- 2.
L. Daston and K. Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 355.
- 3.
E. Spary, ‘Scientific Symmetries’, History of Science 42 (2004), 1–46; J. Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: the Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); C.A. Hanson, The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
- 4.
In using the term ‘connoisseurship’, I simply wish to note that a great part of their activity consisted not only in aesthetic criticism, but in appraising the authenticity and value of artistic and antiquarian objects. I am therefore indebted to the large number of works on the history of connoisseurship in the eighteenth century, especially the ways in which connoisseurship was contested among the partisans of different artistic styles. A recent and instructive example is H. Mount, ‘The Monkey with the Magnifying Glass: Constructions of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Oxford Art Journal 29 (2006), 167–184.
- 5.
As Jordanova shows, the size and scope of Mead’s collection can be gathered from the auction catalogues printed in advance of its sale. His paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, medals and coins were divided into three main sales, detailed in A catalogue of the genuine and capital collection of pictures […] of that late great and learned physician, Doctor Richard Mead (London, 1754); A catalogue of the genuine, entire and curious collection of prints and drawings […] of the late Doctor Mead (London, 1755); and A catalogue of the genuine and entire collection of valuable gems, bronzes, marble and others busts and antiquities, of the late Doctor Mead (London, 1755). His library was also sold off and catalogued in Bibliotheca Meadiana, sive Catalogus Librorum Richardi Mead (London, 1754).
- 6.
L. Jordanova, ‘Portraits, People and Things: Richard Mead and Medical Identity’, History of Science 41 (2003), 293–313, on 307. Jordanova derives this from the biographical account of Mead offered in W. MacMichael, The Gold-headed Cane, 2nd edn (London, 1828), 109.
- 7.
Cheselden advertised the work for potential subscribers in the London Daily Journal on each day that it came out from 18 April–1 May 1727.
- 8.
See for example M. Terrall, ‘Natural Philosophy for Fashionable Readers,’ in Books and the Sciences in History, ed. M. Frasca-Spada and N. Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 239–254.
- 9.
John Douglas, Animadversions on a Late Pompous Book, Intituled, Osteographia: or, The Anatomy of the Bones (London, 1735).
- 10.
W. Cheselden, ‘An Account of Some Observations Made by a Young Gentleman, Who Was Born Blind, or Lost His Sight so Early, That He Had no Remembrance of Ever Having Seen, and Was Couch d between 13 and 14 Years of Age’, Philosophical Transactions 35 (1727–1728), 447–450. The best account of Cheselden’s account and its role in the works of Condillac is J. Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: the Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 19–67. On Edmund Burke’s use of a racially charged moment in this account in his aesthetic theory, see M. Armstrong, ‘“The Effects of Blackness”: Gender, Race, and the Sublime in Aesthetic Theories of Burke and Kant’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54 (1996), 213–36, on 219–20.
- 11.
W. Cheselden, A treatise on the high operation for the stone (London, 1723).
- 12.
R. Houstoun, Lithotomus Castratus; or, Mr Cheselden’s Treatise on the High Operation for the Stone, thoroughly examin’d, and plainly found to be Lithotomia Douglassiana […]. (London, 1723).
- 13.
James Douglas, The History of the Lateral Operation: or, an account of the method of extracting a stone by making a wound near the great protuberance of the Os Ischium (London, 1726) and Douglas, An appendix to the history of the lateral operation for the stone. Containing Mr Cheselden’s present method (London, 1731).
- 14.
By 1792, 13 editions of the work had been printed.
- 15.
I. Bignamini and M. Postle, The Artist’s Model: Its Role in British Art from Lely to Etty (Nottingham: Nottingham University Art Gallery, 1991), 10.
- 16.
Bignamini and Postle, The Artist’s Model, 12–13, 86; J. Kirkup, “Cheselden, William (1688–1752),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, October 2006, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5226 (accessed July 15, 2013).
- 17.
In the first edition of his Anatomy of the Humane Body, Cheselden explained that he intended his book to be read by those who ‘study Anatomy for their Entertainment’. See W. Cheselden, The Anatomy of the Humane Body (London, 1713), vii. In a number of his other published works, and in advertisements for public lectures, Cheselden made similar statements, explaining that his audiences would not be troubled by anything displeasing or tedious. See for example an advertisement placed in the Daily Courant No. 6057, 21 March 1721; W. Cheselden, The Anatomy of the Human Body, 5th edn (London, 1740), preface (unpaginated); W. Cheselden, Osteographia, or The Anatomy of the Bones (London, 1733), epistle to the reader (unpaginated).
- 18.
W. Cowper, Myotomia Reformata, or an Anatomical Treatise on the Muscles of the Human Body 2nd edn (London, 1724). See C. A. Hanson, ‘Anatomy, Newtonian Physiology and Learned Culture: The Myotomia Reformata and its Context within Georgian Scholarship’, in Anatomy and the Organization of Knowledge, 1500–1850, ed. M. Landers and B. Muñoz (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012).
- 19.
W. Cheselden, advertisements placed in the London Daily Journal on each day that it came out from 18 April–1 May 1727.
- 20.
Cheselden, Anatomy, 5th edn (London, 1740), ‘Advertisement’ (unpaginated).
- 21.
Cheselden, advertisements in the London Daily Journal, 18 April–1 May 1727.
- 22.
Cheselden, Anatomy, 5th edn (London, 1740), ‘Advertisement’ (unpaginated), ‘There were two hundred and three remaining after the subscribers had their books, four score and three of which I have cut to pieces.’
- 23.
Ibid., ‘Advertisement’ (unpaginated).
- 24.
J. Belchier, ‘An Account of a Book: Osteographia, or, the Anatomy of the Bones by William Cheselden’, Philosophical Transactions, 38 (1733–1734), 194–98, on 195. Belchier was Cheselden’s apprentice. Although Belchier does not explain exactly which of Salvator Rosa’s prints the figure in the frontispiece was based on, it is clearly derived from ‘Diogenes Casting Away his Bowl’, Salvator Rosa, Rome, 1661–62, which may be found in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (Museum number 24448).
- 25.
The Osteographia’s initials, along with its head- and tailpieces, are stylistically similar to those in Cowper’s Myotomia Reformata, 2nd edn (London, 1724). On Cowper’s initials, see M. A. Sanders, ‘William Cowper and his Decorated Copperplate Initials’, The Anatomical Record Part B: The New Anatomist, 282:1 (2005), 5–12.
- 26.
Cheselden, Osteographia, Epistle to the Reader (unpaginated).
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
Consider for example this disclaimer in Nehemiah Grew’s The Anatomy of Plants. With an Idea of a Philosophical History of Plants, And several other Lectures, Read before the Royal Society (London, 1682), Preface (unpaginated), ‘Some of the Plates, especially those which I did not draw to the Engravers hand, are a little hard and stiff: but they are all well enough done, to represent what they intend.’
- 29.
Cheselden, Osteographia, Epistle to the Reader (unpaginated).
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Cheselden, Osteographia, ‘Chapter VIII. Comparative Sceletons etc.’ (unpaginated).
- 32.
J. Belchier, ‘An Account of a Book’, 197.
- 33.
J. Douglas, ‘Proposals for Printing (in Quarto) by Subscription, Osteographia Anatomico-Practica’, attached at the very end of the Animadversions, 28.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Ibid., 30.
- 36.
Ibid., 28.
- 37.
Ibid., 25–6.
- 38.
Ibid., 26.
- 39.
It is interesting to note that the engraver George Vertue, one of Gerard Vandergucht’s immediate contemporaries, found Cheselden’s remarks to be quite proper. As he put it, ‘I think the characters (Mr. Chiselden in his preface to his most excellent book of Osteology or discription of bones) of the Engravers who perform that work very skilfully are truly what they well deserve, and G. Vander Gucht has shown all the Art that possibly can be performed in such a work not excelld, or to be out done in yt part by the famousst Engravers abroad … Shinvot has also well succeed in his part, this I mention in respect to a branch of Art I am best able to Judge of, that it will be a lasting monument to their honour, and this Nation. For perfection of Art in any part of the World is very rare.’ See G. Vertue, Note Books, ed. K.A. Esdaile, H.M. Hake, G.S.H. Fox-Strangeways, 6 vols (Oxford: Walpole Society, 1930–55), vol. 3 (printed as the 22nd volume of the Walpole Society), 77.
- 40.
Ibid., 30.
- 41.
Ibid., 28–38. The quotation is on 32.
- 42.
Ibid., 38.
- 43.
Cheselden, Osteographia, ‘Chapter VIII. Comparative Sceletons etc.’ (unpaginated); Douglas, Animadversions, 29.
- 44.
Houston, Lithotomus Castratus, 5.
- 45.
P. Mortensen, ‘Francis Hutcheson and the Problem of Conspicuous Consumption’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53:2 (1995), 155–65, on 156–7; B. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private vices publick benefits (London, 1714).
- 46.
J. Richardson, Two Discourses. I. Essay On the whole Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting […]. II. An argument in behalf of the science of a connoisseur (London, 1719), 5.
- 47.
Mortensen, ‘Hutcheson and Conspicuous Consumption’, 162; F. Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1725).
- 48.
Richardson, Essay On the whole Art of Criticism, 203.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful for the opportunity afforded to me by the organizers of the ‘Material Cultures of the Long Eighteenth Century’ workshop at the Huntington Library (April 2012), Adriana Craciun and Simon Schaffer, to present my work at that event, and for the subsequent opportunity to publish it in this volume. I am also very grateful for the helpful comments on this work from Rebecca Addicks, Rebecca Bowd, Sarah Easterby-Smith, Craig Ashley Hanson, Simon Schaffer and Anna-Marie Roos. I am as ever extremely happy to acknowledge the help and support of Cécile Bishop.
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Wragge-Morley, A. (2016). Connoisseurship and the Communication of Anatomical Knowledge: The Case of William Cheselden’s Osteographia (1733). In: Craciun, A., Schaffer, S. (eds) The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44379-3_34
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