The Gentleman Artist-Surgeon in Late Victorian Group Portraiture.

In this article I consider the ways in which group portraits of surgeons, a genre associated with inscriptions of corporate membership and institutional authority, reflected the complex and at times contradictory status of surgeons during the late Victorian period. Group portraits from this period offer a diverse range of representations of surgeons - from middle-class professional to hygiene reformer, scientist to cultured gentleman - all of which worked against the popular conception of the surgeon as manual labourer and bloody carpenter. In particular, the emergence during the period of the gentleman artist-surgeon, exemplified by the celebrity surgeon and amateur artist Henry Thompson (1820-1904), signalled a new incarnation of the surgeon and offered an alternative to both the stereotypes of the surgeon as manual labourer and the surgeon or middle-class professional. But there were complexities and contradictions that beset the identity of the gentleman artist-surgeon, and these will be considered with reference to Thompson's own novel, Charley Kingston's Aunt (1885).

Introduction

In 1885 the celebrity surgeon and amateur artist Henry Thompson (writing under the pseudonym Pen Oliver) published a novel entitled Charley Kingston’s Aunt. In it, a medical student, Charley, discovers that the corpse that he has been dissecting is that of his beloved ‘old nanny’. The novel betrays ambivalence on the part of Thompson towards the practice of dissection, the narrator acknowledging that it still generates in most people ‘profound repugnance’ and ‘a half-suppressed wish that no such practice as dissection existed’.1 In what constitutes an awkward solution to the problem of dissection and Charley’s lack of financial security, in the end it is the dissected corpse of Charley Kingston’s aunt that provides the inheritance that ensures the surgeon’s elevated social status.

In this article I analyse the development during the late nineteenth century of the genre of group portraiture – a genre which has received near to no attention in art historical scholarship since Alois Riegl’s The Group Portraiture of Holland (1902) – in order to trace the shifting representation of surgeons in relation to the rise of the professional classes.2 By the end of the century, surgeons had managed to join the ranks of the Victorian middle classes. Yet they continued to be dogged by the popular perception of surgery as rough, bloody work. I therefore consider the ways in which group portraits of surgeons inscribed corporate membership and institutional authority, while reflecting the complex and at times contradictory status of surgeons during the late Victorian period. I show that portrait painters both drew on existing conventions for depicting surgeons as scientists and developed new modes by which to establish them as middle-class professionals and cultured gentlemen. Several scholars have offered accounts of the important place of the visual in Victorian science.3 This article will address the significance of representations of science, especially anatomy, in Victorian portraiture, drawing on Ludmilla Jordanova’s contribution to the subject in Defining Features: Scientific and Medical Portraits 1660–2000.4

I take as my focus three diverse examples, namely Henry Jamyn Brooks’ Council of the College, 1884–85 (1887) and The Viva (1894), and Solomon Joseph Solomon’s An Octave for Mr Ernest Hart at Sir Henry Thompson’s House (c. 1897). None of these paintings have received any focused scholarly attention, and yet they offer three rich case studies of different artistic constructions of surgeons from the period. I argue that these group portraits actively constructed surgeons as professionals, scientists and art connoisseurs respectively. At the same time, although all these roles worked against the stereotype of the surgeon as bloody barber and hangman, and countered associations of surgeons with the Burke and Hare scandal of the 1830s,5 there were tensions among them, especially in terms of the divergent models of masculinity they represented. Recent studies of Victorian masculinity have shed light on the procedures of male self-styling, especially in the case of dandies and aesthetes.6 I seek to extend existing masculinity studies to address the particularly problematic case of Victorian surgeons. In particular, I identify the emergence during the period of the gentleman artist-surgeon, most thoroughly exemplified by Henry Thompson (1820–1904), which signalled a new incarnation of the surgeon and offered an alternative to the figure of the middle-class professional. But while surgery was made less barbaric with the advent of anaesthesia, the work of surgeons remained far from gentlemanly. As Mrs Carey recalls in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915), she ‘did not forget that in her young days no one ever considered the doctor a gentleman’.7

Distinguishing surgeons: Council of the College, 1884–85

Riegl argues in The Group Portraiture of Holland that paintings of surgeons congregating around skeletons or dissecting tables were some of the earliest forms of group portraiture.8 Henry Jamyn Brooks’ Council of the College, 1884–85 (1887, Figure 1) can therefore be located within an artistic tradition dating back to Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp (1632). As in other Victorian portraits and group portraits of surgeons, however, in Brooks’ Council of the College there is a conspicuous absence of any indicators of actual surgery. No painting comparable to Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic (1875) came out of the English context, and even in its American context The Gross Clinic was vehemently criticized for its graphic treatment of the subject of surgery.9 In France, numerous important paintings of surgeons pictured them in anatomy or operating theatres. For example, Henri Gervex’s Avant l’opération (1897) depicts Jules Emile Péan lecturing at the Saint-Louis hospital and demonstrating his homeostatic clamps. Nevertheless, as Mary Hunter has argued, while in Gervex’s painting Péan is presented as a surgeon rather than an anatomist, he is not depicted in the act of surgery.10 She notes that ‘Gervex depicted the moment before the operation, the moment of cleanliness, hygiene, and control, the moment before the surgeon’s clean hands and white shirt would be stained with the woman’s blood’.11

Figure 1

Henry Jamyn Brooks, Council of the College, 1884–85, 1887, oil on canvas, 151 x 212 cm. Courtesy of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Left to right: John Whitaker Hulke, Thomas Bryant, William Cadge, Arthur Edward Durham, Henry Power, George Lawson, Edward Lund, Thomas Spencer Wells, James Paget, John Croft, William Scovell Savory (Vice President), William MacCormac, John Cooper Forster (President), Edward Trimmer (Secretary), Timothy Holmes (Vice-President), Christopher Heath, Matthew Berkeley Hill, John Eric Erichsen, William Allingham, Thomas Smith, Sydney Jones, John Marshall, Joseph Lister, John Wood, Frederic Greville Hallett (Assistant Secretary), Jonathan Hutchinson.

Council of the College, 1884–85 was the first group portrait to be produced of the councillors of the Royal College of Surgeons in a format that would be repeated at various intervals until the present day. It is my contention that this group portrait and those like it that followed reflect both the increased professionalism of surgeons during this period and surgeons’ need to inscribe, construct and affirm their professionalism. After all, any account of the class ascendancy of doctors during the nineteenth century needs to be underscored by an acknowledgement of the precariousness of their middle-class standing. This point is made by Jongwoo Jeremy Kim when he states that ‘[p]rofessional men such as doctors, barristers, vicars, and military officers entered the middle classes by dint of their knowledge and skills, but, among these men, those who did not possess land-based hereditary wealth were often subjected to the ever-present anxiety of losing their social stations’.12

Brooks painted numerous group portraits during the nineteenth century, including Private View of the Old Masters Exhibition, Royal Academy 1888 (1889; National Portrait Gallery), a painting of the most powerful members of the late Victorian art world.13 A consideration of Private View in relation to Council of the College invites reflection on the similarly precarious class status of artists and surgeons during this period, both having succeeded in joining the professional classes but whose gentlemanly standing nonetheless remained precarious owing to the continued association of their occupations with manual labour.14

Brooks described the making of Private View in an unpublished manuscript entitled ‘The Dilettante’ (1914), which provides invaluable insights into how he produced his complex group portraits.15 Significantly, his working method involved selecting subjects and developing a composition independent of the event depicted. He used photography as well as life sittings for the execution of likenesses. He also, on occasion, resorted to using models when organizing a composition, writing that ‘[a]s might be expected, when each person was drawn upon the canvas they did not all fit in, so in many cases I had to change the position and redraw the figure from a model or from the sitter as circumstances permitted’. Brooks’ acknowledgment that each person did not necessarily ‘fit in’ reflects the strange procedure of arranging individual portraits into a cohesive scene involved in the production of group portraits.

The composition Council of the College, 1884–85 resembles William Walker’s widely reproduced engraving of 1862, The Distinguished Men of Science of Great Britain, Living in A.D 1807–8 (Figure 2).16 In particular, the disorganized pile of books in the foreground of Brooks’ painting recalls the placement of the globe, books and other items in Walker’s engraving. Together Walker and Brooks offered a history of British scientific achievement stretching across the nineteenth century from the vantage point of the century’s second half. But Walker included only one surgeon in his invented community of distinguished men of science: Edward Jenner, who was famous for his pioneering work on the smallpox vaccination. In other words, Walker largely excluded surgeons, including high-profile examples (such as Astley Paston Cooper) who were alive in 1807–8.17

Figure 2

John Gilbert after William Walker, The Distinguished Men of Science of Great Britain, Living in 1807/8, c. 1860, platemark 65.6 x 111.6 cm. Wellcome Library, London.

By appropriating Walker’s composition, Brooks’ Council of the College constructed British surgeons as ‘distinguished men of science’. The inclusion of the pile of books in the painting’s foreground denotes the surgeons’ intellect and learning.18 While we cannot identify exactly which books they are, their hefty size and resemblance to those in Walker’s engraving might lead one to conclude that they are tomes of classical scholarship, attributing to the surgeons the classical education of physicians and gentlemen, or books on the body by Vesalius and Cheselden.19

In Council of the College, Brooks drew on conventions for depicting surgeons as scientists which dated back to the eighteenth century and which were associated, above all, with Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of John Hunter (1785). As Ludmilla Jordanova has shown, such conventions were deployed in order to associate doctors and surgeons with learning and scholarship rather than manual labour or the barbarism of surgery and dissection.20 In Brooks’ painting the surgeons stand and sit in front of hung portraits which place them within a lineage of esteemed men of their profession – Reynolds’ portrait of Hunter appearing most prominently in the centre of the composition. Aris Sarafianos writes that ‘[f]rom 1817 onwards, when it passed from the Hunter family to the Royal College of Surgeons, Reynolds’s portrait featured at the centre of the organisation’s public image’.21 In the same year as Brooks painted Council of the College, William Savory, Vice President of the Council, delivered an oration in praise of Hunter, crediting him with raising surgery from the barber’s craft to a scientific art. In Brooks’ painting, Savory rests his head on his hand in a gesture that connotes thoughtfulness, but which also repeats in reverse the pose of Hunter in Reynolds’ portrait (detail, Figure 3). A direct visual connection is therefore established between surgeons past and present.

Figure 3

Detail from Henry Jamyn Brooks, Council of the College, 1884–85, 1887, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

While drawing on traditions in portraiture, especially those associated with eighteenth-century portraits of scientist-surgeons, Council of the College signalled the emergence of a new type of corporate group portraiture, which made visible the professional status and gentlemanly standing of surgeons. Thomas Spencer Wells, President of the Council from 1882 to 1883, presented Brooks’ Council of the College to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1887 on behalf of the subscribers who financed its production.22 One can assume that Wells directed Brooks as to whom to include and where to place them. The painting features representations of some of the Victorian period’s most eminent surgeons: Joseph Lister, John Marshall, James Paget and, of course, Wells. Their uniformity of dress, comportment, gender, class and race attest to the fact that these surgeons were members of a privileged professional corporation. In particular, their black suits enforce, in the words of John Harvey, ‘a certain sombre gravity of power’.23

At the same time, individual surgeons are distinguished through facial features, hand gestures and their placement in the composition. The President of the Council, John Cooper Forester, sits in the middle of the group – the modern-day Christ presiding over the Last Supper – unmovable in his triangulated body shape and differentiated by his red gown that is visually echoed in the red of the portraits behind him. Wells sits two places to the President’s right. He refrains from engaging in discussion with other members of the group and, in so doing, is separated out from the general assembly. He also appears against a blank wall rather than in front of other men, which further distinguishes him from the crowd. The senior surgeon, James Paget, stands to the right of Wells and is the only figure to look out directly towards the viewer in much the same way as he does in the 1872 portrait of him by John Everett Millais. Finally, Lister (detail, Figure 4) stands apart from the surrounding clusters while Jonathan Hutchinson points at him, directing the viewer’s eye to the esteemed inventor of antiseptics. Even in the context of a group portrait, individual innovation is constructed as requiring a degree of separation from the group.

Figure 4

Detail from Henry Jamyn Brooks, Council of the College, 1884–85, 1887, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

The placement of figures also reveals political alliances and divisions among the surgeons. In 1745 the Company of Surgeons broke away from the Barber-Surgeons’ Company; in 1800 it obtained a royal charter and became a Royal College; and in 1845 its jurisdiction was extended to cover the whole of England.24 In the 1880s the movement for obtaining greater privileges and power for Fellows and Members began to gain momentum.25 Brooks’ painting might document specific council meetings that took place during the years 1884 and 1885 at which votes were taken on several important resolutions relating to the corporate organization and running of the College. For example, on May 8, 1884, the councillors passed a resolution allowing Fellows and Members to hold annual meetings, but rejected the recommendation that Fellows elect the President of the College.26

Lister was one of only five councillors who supported having Fellows vote for the President of the College at the May 8 meeting.27 This is unsurprising considering that Lister’s antiseptic techniques were not initially embraced by the older generation of British surgeons who made up the majority of the council, especially during the years 1884–5.28 Savory publicly opposed Lister in an address delivered at the British Medical Association in 1879. In Brooks’ painting, Lister’s status as sidelined and contrary is suggested through his turning his back on the majority of councillors as though he is walking away. He is couched between John Marshall (standing) – one of the early advocates of Listerian antisepsis – and John Wood (seated), who was lecturer of clinical surgery jointly with Lister at King’s College Hospital.29 Marshall and Wood, it seems, were content to be pictured in Lister’s proximity.

Examining surgeons: The Viva

Whereas Brooks’ painting of the councillors depicts surgeons who had already been admitted into the inner sanctum of the Royal College of Surgeons, his later group portrait, The Viva (1894, Figure 5),30 depicts the procedures involved in gaining admission to the profession.31 It features representations of recognizable surgeons – John Wood and Jonathan Hutchinson at the front table; Edward Lund and William MacCormac to the left; and John Marshall and Frederick Le Gros Clark on the right – all but Clark having appeared in Council of the College. They are shown administering an examination and thereby granting (or denying) the next generation of surgeons access into the profession.32 The painting illustrates the increased importance of medical corporations, such as the Royal College of Surgeons, in examining and certifying candidates’ fitness to practise medicine.33 It attests to the rigorous training and stringent examinations required of surgeons and emphasizes the difficulty of gaining admission to surgery’s professional institutions.34

Figure 5

Henry Jamyn Brooks, The Viva, 1894, oil on canvas, 77 x 141 cm. Courtesy of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Left to right: Edward Lund, William MacCormac, John Wood, Jonathan Hutchinson, John Marshall, Frederick Le Gros Clark.

Thompson described an oral examination for admission to the Royal College of Surgeons in Charley Kingston’s Aunt. He noted that the examination ‘consisted solely of questions personally addressed to the candidate during the short term of one hour by several different examiners in succession’, and that ‘each examiner was more or less a surgical celebrity’.35 He wrote: ‘[A]t each table sat two examiners, and one vacant chair … Four students at a time were ushered in with ceremony. One was conducted to each table, and each remained there receiving and answering questions.’36 That Brooks depicted an oral examination with single candidates being examined by two surgical celebrities corroborates Thompson’s description, suggesting that Brooks’ painting is an accurate record of an actual event. By the time of the painting’s execution, however, three of the surgical celebrities – Marshall, Wood and Clark – were dead. It is possible that Brooks used studies and photographs from Council of the College for the production of The Viva. The painting seems to have been commissioned by Hutchinson as a retrospective group portrait, intended to memorialize the experience of examining with his late friend, Wood.

As in the previous group portrait by Brooks, objects are included in order to indicate the surgeons’ learning and knowledge. A large folder, presumably with demonstrative anatomical diagrams, is positioned next to the examiners in the foreground. Books lie on the floor behind the examiners to the right of the picture. These items are carefully positioned near to the senior surgeons as opposed to the younger candidates, thereby attributing the possession of knowledge to them, rather than to the aspiring surgeons who have yet to prove their credentials. It is also possible that they are books that Marshall had written, such as A description of the human body: its structure and functions designed for the use of teachers in schools and young men destined for the medical profession, and for popular instruction generally (1860).37

The painting entered the Royal College of Surgeons’ collection in 1948, having previously been housed in the Haslemere Museum in Surrey, which Hutchinson established in 1894 as an educational museum of specimens scientifically arranged for methodical instruction and study, and before that in Hutchinson’s educational museum in Shelby.38 I believe that The Viva had an educational purpose: to guide viewers at an educational museum as to the right and wrong way to examine the specimens on display.39 From as early as 1885, Hutchinson expressed the view that ‘educational museums and the improvement of educational examinations’ were ‘two of the most important features in the development of objective teaching’.40 He even went so far as to institute museum examinations for children, which required the close study of items in the collection and demanded the ‘identification on the spot of certain miscellaneous objects and portraits taken from the museum’.41

In both museum education and medical education, Hutchinson advocated the intimate handling of specimens in order to accumulate knowledge. In a speech given at the opening of the Museum of Antiquities and Natural Curiosities in Newbury in 1904, he stated that educational museums were ‘designed to accumulate evidence of a kind which is likely to make pleasurable, clear and deep impressions. The objects contained in them are not only to be seen, but when suitable, to be handled.’42 He advised that curators of educational museums should ‘avoid all expensive objects’ and ‘rarities’, displaying instead ‘objects which can be handled without damage and replaced without much cost’.43 Furthermore, according to Hutchinson, the handling of objects was required in the context of museum and medical examinations. In 1895 he said of objective examinations that ‘objective’ meant ‘the inspection, identification, and description of things’, and that ‘[i]n Geology, for instance, a man could not offhand identify the spine of an echinus or distinguish the shells of a brachiopod from the true bivalve unless he had seen and handled such objects before’.44

In Brooks’ picture of a medical examination, the prospective surgeon at the table to the painting’s right uses his sense of touch to identify his specimen, actively handling it in much the same way as visitors to the Haslemere Museum were invited to handle the objects on display. Rather than just looking at the specimen, as does the prospective surgeon in the background to the left, the student holds and feels it, engaging in a seemingly more successful mode of identification. We are also invited to compare the ways in which the student in the foreground and the student to the back left examine their specimens. Both deploy their sense of vision, but the figure in the foreground is depicted as actively investigating his specimen.

It is possible that the surgical student in the foreground was modelled on Victor Horsley (1857–1916), son of the artist John Callcott Horsley, as is suggested by his distinguishing handlebar moustache and the flamboyant manner in which he examines his specimen.45 Furthermore, he is depicted examining a brain in a jar, an appropriate choice for one of the pioneers of modern neurology. By the time of the painting’s execution, Horsley was well established as a leader in the field of cerebral surgery, having performed some of the first successful operations of their kind.46 The presentation of Horsley as a student, therefore, indicates the painting’s status as nostalgic recreation.

Artworks appear prominently in this scene of anatomical investigation, indicating the presence of art within surgical training. They also allude to the importance of anatomical knowledge for artistic renderings of the human form. On the mantel there are classical statuettes – the Apollo Belvedere and The Dancing Faun – two classical male nudes, which were used in the study of anatomy by both surgeons and artists during the nineteenth century.47 The inclusion of these statuettes reminds the viewer of medicine’s and art’s shared investment in the visual, and the ways in which both medical diagnostics and art making, especially sculpture, engage the tactile.48

As in Council of the College, portraits of surgeons past appear in The Viva. They allude to the lineage of surgeons to which the students are attempting to gain access and who representationally oversee their examination. On the left is the portrait of Anthony Carlisle by Martin Archer Shee (1824); on the right is Astley Paston Cooper by Thomas Lawrence (1828); the central portrait, however, is so severely truncated that it is difficult to attribute firmly.49 Like Hunter, these surgeons were celebrated as learned men of science, specifically of anatomy.50 In fact, it is those signifiers of scientific learning – the skull, paper and quill, and books – that remain visible even after the paintings have been cropped by Brooks’ composition.

But the inclusion of portraits in a painting intended for Hutchinson’s educational museum holds further significance. Hutchinson established a portrait gallery in the Haslemere Museum because he believed that ‘[t]he study of the features of the human face is one of universal interest, and in many ways likely to prove elevating and profitable’.51 Students undertaking his museum examinations were required to identify personages in portraits as well as objects from the natural sciences. Like the prospective surgeons in Brooks’ painting who are required to identify body parts on the basis of the close examination of anatomical specimens, and the students at the Haslemere Museum who were required to identify portraits as part of their museum examinations, we viewers are challenged to identify the surgeons in the portraits on the basis of the body parts and props provided. Because the sitters are compositionally decapitated by the top edge of the canvas, however, these are portraits without faces. In turn, our ability to identify them accurately is problematized.

In the identification of anatomical and pathological specimens, as with the identification of sitters in portraits, diagnostic looking is required, but it is also liable to error and misrecognition, especially when it is only a partial body that is in view. As pictured in The Viva, in order to become surgeons, the students have to examine the anatomical specimens and identify them correctly. At the same time, the surgeons in the scene (and the modern viewer outside it) examine the students in order to assess who might be admitted into the corporation of surgeons.52 As recalled by his biographer, Herbert Hutchinson, however, Hutchinson was critical of the way vivas were conducted at the Royal College of Surgeons. ‘He sought to eliminate the personal element’ and ‘felt very keenly the unfairness of the viva-voce’. ‘The state of health and temper of the examiner, the difference or similarity of temperament between examiner and examined, might count for much; and make or mar the future of a young man.’53 Horsley too was also known for his ‘contempt for examinations as any real test of knowledge or capacity’.54 In The Viva, the vignette at the front table of the examiner who is becoming exhausted and exasperated with the student offers a cautionary lesson about the dangers of the viva voce.

The portraits and busts in Brooks’ The Viva represent bodily fragments, much like the specimens in jars, the surgeons’ bodies having been similarly anatomized. Furthermore, in the portrait of Carlisle, we do not see his head but we do see a skull, another body part, which relates to the skull in the painting’s foreground. More generally, the proliferation of body parts in the picture betrays an underlying anxiety about the practice of dissection. Aside from the surgeons and surgical students, the only complete bodies that appear in The Viva are those of the classical statuettes – art having managed to return the body to an ideal wholeness.

In fact, it is precisely this tension between the part and the whole, or generalized anatomy and individual identity, which forms the basis of the plot of Thompson’s Charley Kingston’s Aunt. Charley recalls that ‘a body designated for anatomical dissection … is divided for the purpose into certain definite “parts”’, and that ‘[t]he “part” which I required was the head and neck’.55 ‘Uncovering the bust for general inspection, I remarked the unusually pale and emaciated conditions of the subject … Then I commenced my work.’56 Charley is beset by the uncanny sensation that ‘the part’ is somehow familiar, but ‘I myself have always been a prey to that curious, semi-artistic facility for seeing resemblances, everywhere, in all bodies animate and inanimate, to other known forms and features’.57 Note how in the context of the dissecting room the ‘semi-artistic facility’ for identifying resemblances is invoked. Later that evening, having finally recognized the individual from the body part that he had been dissecting, he proclaims: ‘Good heavens! The old aunt!’58

Painting surgeons: An Octave for Mr Ernest Hart at Sir Henry Thompson’s House

The two group portraits by Brooks that I have discussed thus far can convincingly be described as medical group portraits by virtue of the fact that they feature medical men situated within the medical institution of the Royal College of Surgeons. While neither painting shows them performing actual surgeries, they do show surgeons at work: attending a council meeting and administering an examination. By contrast, Solomon Joseph Solomon’s An Octave (Figure 6) shows surgeons as leisured gentlemen enjoying a dinner party.

Figure 6

Solomon Joseph Solomon, An Octave for Mr Ernest Hart at Sir Henry Thompson’s House, c. 1897, oil on canvas, 71.5 x 103.5 cm. Wellcome Library, London. Clockwise: Ernest Abraham Hart, Thomas Spencer Wells, Joseph Fayrer, Thomas Lauder Brunton, W.H. Broadbent, George Anderson Critchett, Victor Horsley, Richard Quain, James Paget, Henry Thompson.

An Octave is a study in impressionistic light effects. The surface is thick with paint and there are visible smudges, especially in the artist’s treatment of the flowers and lamps. A striking visual effect is also produced by the shine on the silver and glassware. Solomon was a Royal Academician but was also involved in the formation of the New English Art Club. Although he is usually associated with the production of academic history paintings in the style of Frederic Leighton and Alexandre Cabanel, such as Samson (1884) and Ajax and Cassandra (1886), An Octave is illustrative of Solomon’s work as a portrait painter.59

Solomon’s painting features well-known medical men from the late nineteenth century – (clockwise from centre back) Ernest Abraham Hart, Wells, Joseph Fayrer, Thomas Lauder Brunton, William Broadbent, George Anderson Critchett, Horsley, Richard Quain, Paget and Thompson – assembled around an opulently adorned dining table. They all wear black dinner suits and are engaged in leisured activities, indicating their status as gentlemen of the upper middle class. There is nothing in the scene to suggest that they are surgeons. Rather, the painting fits within a body of work by Solomon of fashionable members of society at leisure, including his 1884 painting Conversation Piece. These works are characterized by their attention to the rendering of light and shadow, executed through the use of loose, visible brushwork.

The title, An Octave for Mr Ernest Hart at Sir Henry Thompson’s House, informs us that the painting is of one of Thompson’s famous octave dinner parties of eight men of different professions at which eight dishes were served. These dinner parties reinforced a homosocial network of upper-middle-class men; in Solomon’s painting the working-class butler is compositionally excluded from the circle, and women were never invited. In Solomon’s scene there are, in fact, more than eight men dining and they are all members of the same profession. Consequently, the painting starts to appear more like a group portrait than a genre scene or conversation piece, the domestic interior becoming a site for professional networking.60

The letters and diaries of the sitters reveal the close relationships that existed between them. Broadbent, physician, expert neurologist and authority on heart disease, wrote that ‘I have always looked up to and reverenced Sir James Paget’.61 Horsley travelled to Paris with Brunton, the authority on the action of drugs on the heart. Additionally, it is likely that Thompson, as professor of clinical surgery and then consulting surgeon at University College Hospital, taught Horsley when he was a student there from 1874 to 1880. Horsley subsequently became house surgeon to John Marshall and surgical registrar at UCH.62 In Solomon’s painting, Horsley and Thompson, who appear one above the other, are visually connected through their similarly cocked and turned heads, and through their handlebar moustaches, giving the impression that the younger Horsley has been positioned as successor to the more senior Thompson.

Preparatory painted sketches of each individual figure indicate that the sitters were strategically assembled, not unlike Brooks’ group portrait of the councillors. In other words, the arrangement of the figures was not haphazard. Hart – surgeon, medical journalist and guest of honour at Thompson’s banquet – is situated in the centre of the composition, visible through the gap between Critchett and Horsley, his face the most clearly visible in the group. Thompson and Wells are positioned on either side of Hart. While both were celebrity doctors in their day, there is further significance to this compositional arrangement. Thompson was the foremost advocate for cremation during the second half of the nineteenth century and, significantly, artists and doctors were particularly well represented among its supporters, especially Hart and Wells. The highly publicized project of hygiene reform counteracted the popular perception of surgeons as bloody carpenters, with cremation offering an arguably better fate for a corpse than dissection.

Their arguments in favour of cremation were generally that decomposing corpses were unhygienic, even toxic, particularly in expanding urban centres with growing populations, and that cremation was a cleaner and healthier way to dispose of the dead.63 In fact, Wells read a paper at the British Medical Association meeting in Cambridge in 1880 in which he cited many arguments in favour of cremation with the aim of enlisting the support of the medical profession. The outcome was 120 signatures for a letter to the Home Secretary appealing for new legislation.64 Correspondence between Hart and Thompson held in the Wellcome Library refers to a common endeavour, possibly a shrouded reference to cremation. Thompson wrote to Hart that ‘I have always consulted you mainly in all this matter, because you were the only man who knows what to do’, and later that ‘Wells has written me that he is having some communication with Lord Doiley who “might be” induced to bring in a bill’.65 Therefore, the painting, through the arrangement of the figures, celebrated a community of medical men and highlighted those individuals who participated in significant contemporaneous debates around hygiene reform.66

Having established that Solomon’s painting is a medical group portrait, what is especially significant is that the setting is the ‘aestheticized’ interior of Thompson’s home. In Celebrities at Home of 1878, Edmund Yates described the inside of Thompson’s house on Wimpole Street, taking particular note of his fine and decorative art collection: ‘Sir Henry Thompson’s two consulting-rooms are full of china … the brilliant blue and white contrasts effectively with the dark green of a bower of palms and ferns, and the rich warm tone of several fine Ettys. The atmosphere of art pervades the entire house.’67 In the background of An Octave one can identify Thompson’s art and porcelain collection. Porcelain collecting was closely associated with the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement by this time, with Thompson having acquired pieces of blue and white china from artists James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Additionally, Thompson illustrated a book about porcelain with Whistler in 1878, further connecting the surgeon to the artistic circles of the late nineteenth century.68

By collecting art, doctors fashioned themselves into cultured gentlemen, connoisseurs with good taste. In Charley Kingston’s Aunt, Thompson commented on the practice of art collecting among doctors: ‘it is an indisputable [fact], that almost every medical man of ordinary intelligence, who achieves a fair share of success in his profession … becomes a fine art collector of some sort’. He continued: ‘In the towns and in the metropolis he collects engravings, etchings, watercolour drawings, or he may possess works in oil by the best artists, not merely of modern time, but here and there a choice old master. Or he treasures up old plate, or Wedgwood, or Sèvres, or Oriental china, or ivories, or woodcarvings.’69

As well as collecting art Thompson was an amateur artist, exhibiting paintings on occasion at the Royal Academy and Paris Salon. This was the subject of satirical treatment in Punch’s ‘Fancy Portrait’ (1881, Figure 7), in which Thompson is referred to as ‘Great Artist-Surgeon, who so well is able, To Point a Pencil and Adorn a Table?’ The reference to Thompson’s skill at adorning a table and the inclusion in the picture of a ‘menu for dinner’ references his famous octaves and his publication Food and Feeding (1880).70 Yet, in the caricature the table is not the elaborately adorned dinner table of Solomon’s painting; it is the wooden dissecting table with what looks like carpentry tools. Moreover, in the background there is a lay figure, which was used as an aid by artists, and a skeleton, which hovers as a macabre reminder of the dead bodies with which the ‘great artist-surgeon’ works. The caricaturist draws on the old stereotype of surgeons as manual labourers whose business is the violent cutting open of living and dead bodies.

Figure 7

Lindsay Sambourne, Punch’s Fancy Portraits – No. 42. Dr. Henry Thompson, Punch 81 (1881), 46. Wellcome Library, London.

Historically artists and surgeons collaborated in the study of anatomy, and this continued throughout the nineteenth century in England. But there emerged in the century’s final decades a social network of gentleman artists and surgeons, in which Thompson was a central figure, and who were more likely to be photographed and painted dining together than dissecting together. Thompson numbered among his friends several influential members of the late Victorian art world, including Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John Everett Millais, and together they enjoyed leisured pursuits befitting gentlemen of the upper middle class.

Millais exhibited his famous portrait of Thompson at the Royal Academy in 1882 (Figure 8), but what is little known is that during a weekend away at Robert Collier’s house, Thompson painted Millais’ portrait.71 The following was recounted by Thompson to Millais’ son, John Guille Millais, and published in The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (1899), along with reproductions of Thompson’s portrait of Millais and Millais’ portrait of Thompson:

Figure 8

John Everett Millais, Sir Henry Thompson, Bt, 1881, oil on canvas, 125.7 x 91.4 cm. © Tate, London 2012.

Sir Robert Collier (afterwards Lord Monkswell) invited Sir Henry James (now Lord James), Sir John Millais, and myself to his house in Essex, from Saturday to Monday, as a whist party. It was cold, wintry weather, near Christmas, and on Sunday morning James, being then Attorney-General, and Collier, being Lord Justice of Privy Council, thought that officially they had better go to church. Millais and I elected to stay at home. Said I to Millais, ‘What are you going to do?’ He said ‘Sit here and smoke’. ‘Then,’ said I, ‘I will get a little mill-board, set a palette and paint you, if I may’. ‘All right,’ said he. He sat quite still with his back to the window, and I set to work. I worked at my study the best part of two hours, and put it on the mantelpiece. Soon afterwards the two others came in. ‘There,’ said Millais, ‘that’s what we’ve been doing!’ It was never touched afterwards, and they all thought it would do as it was.72

This incident illustrates that portraits not only inscribed elevated social status, they also sometimes constituted tokens of intimate friendship between artists and surgeons.73

Solomon and Thompson, it appears, moved in the same social circles and knew each other beyond the relationship of portraitist and sitter.74 But perhaps the explanation for the choice of Solomon as the artist for An Octave, or conversely Solomon’s choice of subject, lies in the figure of Hart. Both Solomon and Hart were high-profile members of the Victorian Anglo-Jewish community, and, significantly, Solomon featured Hart in an earlier work entitled Your Health, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1894. Therefore, in two major works, Solomon honoured Hart, a Jewish surgeon who represented a new generation of cosmopolitan Jewish professionals.75

What is so provocative about Solomon’s depiction of Hart, however, is that he is shown smoking a cigarette. According to Yates, Thompson also smoked cigarettes, his afternoon ritual consisting of a ‘slight snack followed by a cigarette’.76 A consideration of the individual painted studies for An Octave in relation to the finished canvas reveals changes that were made to the final composition, including having Hart smoking a cigarette instead of sipping tea (Figure 9). This is a remarkable inclusion considering that, while smoking cigars and pipes was part of the rituals of upper and middle-class male leisure, the cigarette, which was only widely available in England from the 1880s onwards, was associated with debased mass production, dandies, avant-garde artists and the gender transgressions of the New Woman.77

Figure 9

Solomon Joseph Solomon, Study of Ernest Abraham Hart, oil on wood, 35.5 x 26 cm. Wellcome Library, London.

The cigarette was widely considered to be inferior to the pipe and cigar, and those men who smoked it were branded not ‘man enough’ to smoke properly.78 In an engraving of a medical student by John Orrin Smith, after Joseph Kenny Meadows, published in Heads of the people; or, Portraits of the English (1840) the morbid pleasures that the medical student takes in murder and dissection are tied up with his less-than-manly demeanour and his habit of smoking.79 After all, smoking in dissecting theatres was a common way for medical students to mask the stench of rotting cadavers.80 Charley Kingston’s Aunt makes repeated mention of tobacco smoking among medical students, especially the smoking of cigars. In one instance Charley’s friend, the house surgeon, Allison, settles into an armchair with a ‘cigarette in his mouth’.81

With reference to other painted male cigarette smokers from the final decades of the nineteenth century, the depiction of Hart with a cigarette may be understood as an attempt at forging an alternative yet still acceptable late-Victorian masculine identity. The artist James Tissot produced two portraits of well-known Victorian men smoking: Colonel Frederick Gustave Burnaby (1870, Figure 10) smoking a cigarette and the art collector Algernon Moses Marsden (1877) smoking a cigar. Both men are depicted as debonair, languid, cultured gentlemen in domestic spaces filled with objects that connote their exploits, including porcelain collecting in the case of Marsden.

Figure 10

James Tissot, Frederick Gustavus Burnaby, 1870, oil on panel, 49.5 x 59.7 cm. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Colonel Burnaby is shown amid items that reflect his occupation: the shiny silver breastplate and helmet, books and a world map, all signalling the figure’s military successes and foreign travel. Yet, despite Colonel Burnaby’s military achievements, he is depicted as languid and even effete, and the cigarette contributes to this. He elegantly holds his cigarette so that it is positioned in the centre of the composition. Its long slender appearance is mirrored in Burnaby’s elongated legs, and its white colour picked up in the white sash across his chest and the horizontal line formed by the base of the map’s frame. Taking this a step further, Tissot’s portrait of Burnaby is rendered predominantly in white, red and black, precisely the colours of the cigarette itself, and this recalls the cigarette colour scheme of the 1894 New Woman poster by Albert George Morrow for the Comedy Theatre in the Victoria and Albert Collection. If the cigarette in the bottom corner of Morrow’s poster signifies the New Woman, then Colonel Burnaby with his cigarette represents a new kind of man.

Returning to Solomon’s depiction of Hart, his appearance amid Thompson’s art and ceramic collection, along with his casual smoking of a cigarette, indicates that he represents, not just a new type of modern, Victorian man, but a new type of modern, Jewish, ‘aestheticized’ Victorian surgeon. Christopher Lawrence offers a possible explanation for the adoption by surgeons of ‘qualities usually specified as feminine’ when he notes that ‘they could … be invoked to counter the ascribed coarseness of surgeons’.82 But, more than that, the gentleman artist-surgeon, depicted by Solomon in An Octave, signalled a departure from earlier nineteenth-century models of the surgeon as institutionalized authority and middle-class professional (as per Brooks’ Council of the College) and scientist (as per The Viva).

Conclusion

When the critic for The Times reviewed Millais’ portrait of Thompson, he compared George Frederick Watts’ and Millais’ styles of portrait painting, stating that ‘Mr Watts tries to show us what there is in a man … Mr Millais shows us what there is out of him. One opens the letter and the other reads the envelope.’83 Indeed, Victorian critics were eager to identify in Millais’ rendering of Thompson those indicators of the sitter’s ‘strong individual character’ and his ‘look of keen precision’, which were characteristic of ‘the great surgeon’.84 Millais invited his viewers to read intellect in the great surgeon’s tall forehead, concentration in his direct stare and the creases in his brow, distinction in his straight nose, moderation in his stark black dinner suit and an attention to detail in his monocle. Thompson’s envelope was that of the consummate Victorian gentleman.

British portraits of surgeons from the 1880s and ’90s consistently showed them as suited gentlemen. In the words of James Ewing Mears in The Evolution of Surgery (1904), the surgeon had climbed from the position of ‘bleeder and barber’ to ‘pathologist [and] diagnostician’ and was now ‘crowned above all as the refined and cultured gentleman’.85 Group portraits, such as those by Brooks, asserted the professionalism of surgery, the increased power of medical corporations and the difficulty in gaining admission to the profession. Other portraits, such as Solomon’s An Octave, celebrated the emergence of a new type of gentleman artist-surgeon who dabbled in art, collected porcelain, smoked cigarettes, decorated his house and held lavish dinner parties. But as the ‘Fancy Portrait’ of Thompson from Punch attests, the gentleman artist-surgeon was not an unproblematic category, for in the ungainly nature of the oversized surgical knife-turned-pencil, and in the mess of saws, scissors and screws, the association of surgery with butchery could not be so easily concealed beneath a tailored dinner suit.