Putting Faces to Names
For the last two weeks I have been working on cataloguing the College's collection of visual material. I started with the portrait collection, much of which was collected by Kirkpatrick, the College Registrar, medical historian and hoarder of all things! Luckily as well as collecting a lot of portraits, Kirkpatrick was extremely meticulous in labelling them and in a collection of about 500 portraits I have only a handful that I don't know the name of. The portrait collection is made up of various types of engravings, drawings, caricatures and photographs. The focus of the collection is medical doctors, especially those with Irish connections, but the engravings are slightly wider in scope and include historical and literary figures, again predominantly those with an Irish connection.
I've found it particularly interesting to be able to put faces to the names of the doctors I've been reading, and blogging, about for the last few months and so here are some of the faces of the people who have appeared in my blog posts:
A forty years younger, but very recognisable,
Two lithographs of one of the College's most famous sons, William Stokes, 1804-1878
James Little, 1837-1916
I've not actually written anything about Little yet, I just like the picture.
As well as the photographs and commercially produced prints the collection includes one off pieces of artwork, like the
portrait of Moore, which the College commissioned. One of the most unusual of these pieces is a death study of George Sigerson, a Fellow of the College, by Estella Solomons, sister of
Dr Bethel Solomons.