Oesper Chemistry Collection Helps Professor Clear Up Portrait Mystery

Given these accomplishments, it is surprising that no known portrait of Hooke has survived, though it is speculated that at least two were painted during his lifetime. This lack of a surviving portrait became one of the central themes of the 2003 tricentennial commemoration of Hooke’s death. Several art contests were sponsored in which artists submitted their impressions of what Hooke might have looked like based on surviving written accounts of his physical appearance. Even more exciting was the announcement by British historian Lisa Jardine that she had discovered one of the missing Hooke portraits in the holdings of the British Natural History Museum. This portrait was reproduced on the cover of her recent biography of Hooke and became the centerpiece of an exhibition on Hooke held at Oxford.

UC professor of chemistry, William Jensen, has now shown that this identification is wrong: “The moment I saw the portrait on the front of Jardine’s book,” Jensen said, “I was struck by a strong feeling of déja vu.” A quick search of UC’s Oesper History of Chemistry Collection showed that the portrait corresponded to an etching of the 17th-century Flemish physician and alchemist, Joan Baptista Van Helmont (1579-1644).

Using the resources of the Oesper Collection, and the assistance of John Tebo, head of the Chemistry-Biology Library, and library staff, Jensen was able to trace the etching back to a book of Van Helmont’s writings published in Amsterdam in 1648. He then was able to offer a probable route as to how the corresponding oil painting managed to end up in England. “The resources of the Chemistry-Biology Library were indispensable in making the correct identification,” Jensen noted. “Every source we needed, from 17th-century monographs to obscure British art catalogs, was here, and we were able to correct the identification without having to visit England itself.”

A paper describing Jensen’s re-identification of the portrait appeared in the November 2004 issue of the British journal Ambix, and the January 2005 issue of Nature featured an article about the portrait mystery.

“Though it is nice to have discovered a previously unknown painting of Van Helmont,” Jensen lamented,” it is in a way unfortunate that Jardine’s assumption was not correct. Hooke was a far more important scientist than Van Helmont, whose only lasting contribution to modern chemistry was his invention of the word ‘gas’.”

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Identifying the portrait (Fig. 1) from the etching of Joan Baptista Van Helmont (Fig. 2) required some visual skill as the figure in the etching was a mirror image of the oil painting, a reversal that happens naturally each time one makes a print from an etched plate. Once the etching was reversed, however, the figures matched one another virtually line for line.

Fig. 1. Close-up of the head in the portrait identified by British historian Lisa Jardine as Robert Hooke (© Natural History Museum London).	Fig. 2. Etching of Joan Baptista Van Helmont (1579-1644) and his son Franciscus Mercurius Van Helmont (1614-1699), from J.B. Van Helmont, Ortus medicinae (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1648) (Oesper Collection).

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