Mulready John Ericsson (1 results)

Soft cover. Condition: Very Good.  (TURNER, J.M.W.)  "Dr. Leibreich on Turner and Mulready", in Nature, a Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science, 21 March 1872, pp 404-406 in the issue of pp 397-416. This issue is extracted from a larger bound volume, clean and tidy, and comes with the scarce (and early) wrappers (though detached). [++] Liebreich (1830-1917) was a fine anatomist, an artist and sculptor, an assistant to one of the 19th century's greatest minds in von Helmholtz, creator of his own ophthalmoscope, and creator of the first atlas of ophthalmology, and so had the chops to look deeply into the possible physiological aspects of vision. He applied this talent to the pre-Impressionist JMW Turner, and evidently found that was people find to be genius in Turner was to Liebreich the possible result of astigmatism. He writes: "It was particularly important to ascertain if the anomaly of the whole picture could be deduced from a regularly recurring fault in its details. This fault is a vertical streakiness, which is caused by every illuminated point having been changed into a vertical line. The elongation is, generally speaking, in exact proportion to the bright- ness of the light; that is to say, the more intense the light which diffuses itself from the illuminated point in nature, the longer becomes the line which represents it on the picture." [++] AND WITH: (TURNER, JMW) W. Mattieu Williams, "Turner's Vision". [++] AND the Williams bound with John Ericsson, "The Temperature of the Surface of the Sun", pp 505-507, with two illustrations. Both in the same issue of Nature, 25 April 1872, volume 5, pg 500 in the issue of pp 497-516 of the full weekly issue. This issue is extracted from a larger bound volume, clean and tidy, and comes with the scarce (and early) wrappers (though detached). [++] W. Mattieu Williams reports on his experiments on the "causes" of the Impressionistic genius and art of JMW Turner, and finds that some of the Turner imagery were results of deformation in the crystalline lens and of prolonged exposure to the Sun and viewing a scene through excessive tears. He writes, "The other phenomena represented by Turner are, I think, simply a faithful copying of the effects of glare and suffusion produced by painful sun-gazing and the looking at a landscape where the shadows are, so to speak, nowhere, or all behind one's-back." I beg to differ. [++] ALSO bound with a significant paper by Ericsson on the temperature of the surface of the Sun. [++]Offered here are two issues, 21 March nd 28 March 1872.