Louis Pasteur (1822–1895),his friendships with the artists Max Claudet (1840–1893) and Paul Dubois (1829–1905),and his public image in the 1870s and 1880s

Abstract

Biographers have largely ignored Louis Pasteur's many and varied connections with art and artists. This article is the third in a series of the authors' studies of Pasteur's friendships with artists. This research project has uncovered data that enlarge the great medical chemist's biography, throwing new light on a variety of topics including his work habits, his social life, his artistic sensibilities, his efforts to lobby on behalf of his artist friends, his relationships to their patrons and to his own patrons, and his use of works of art to foster his reputation as a leader in French medical science. In their first article, the authors examined his unique working relationship with the Finnish painter Albert Edelfelt and the creation of the famous portrait of Pasteur in his laboratory in the mid-1880s. A second study documented his especially warm friendship with three French artists who came from Pasteur's home region, the Jura, or from neighbouring Alsace. The present study explores Pasteur's friendships with Max Claudet and Paul Dubois, both of whom created important representations of Pasteur. These friendships and others with patrons reveal an active pursuit of patronage and reputation building from 1876 into the late 1880s. Yet, although Pasteur actively used public art to raise his status, it becomes clear in these stories that for Pasteur beauty was an ideal and art a pleasure for its own sake.

Keywords

Louis Pasteur fine arts École des beaux-arts patronage Max Claudet Paul Dubois Jean-Jacques Henner Jean-Joseph Perraud Auguste Pointelin JC Jacobsen Carl Jacobsen Albert Edelfelt

Introduction

This article continues a narrative begun in ‘Louis Pasteur's three artist compatriots—Henner, Pointelin and Perraud: A story of friendship, science and art in the 1870s and 1880s’.¹ We argued there that Louis Pasteur's lifelong passion for the fine arts and his deep personal friendships with leading artists were key elements missing from his biographies, a lacuna our research endeavours to fill. That article explained the historical significance of the Paris Salon and Pasteur's engagement with this annual exhibition and that information is not repeated here. The artists examined at length were Jean-Jacques Henner (1829–1905), Auguste Pointelin (1839–1933), and Jean-Joseph Perraud (1819–1876). The article opened with a scene of Pasteur's presence at Perraud's deathbed and closed with two highly emotional speeches Pasteur delivered to memorialize Perraud. This article will close with another story about Perraud's sculpture Les Adieux, Pasteur's favourite work by his friend.

Before embarking on our narrative of Max Claudet and Paul Dubois, readers may find it useful to have in mind some of the general features of Pasteur's life and career that are revealed in an examination of all his friendships with artists. First, the artists were deeply drawn into Pasteur's personal and family life; they were not at the margins nor kept at a distance by an otherwise reticent and often diffident person. Second, Pasteur closely followed the artists' work as well as its critical and popular reception. He approached these matters from an insider's knowledge of art and with the same personal confidence he applied to the reception of scientific ideas. Third, he keenly employed both his stature and his connections to encourage favourable reviews for his friends and burnish their reputations. Fourth, he recognized how the fine arts could foster his own reputation and he used painting and sculpture as deftly and passionately as he employed rhetorical skills to support his discoveries in chemistry, biology and medicine.

Max Claudet

Pasteur's warm, almost filial relationship with Perraud sets the context for understanding his and his family's relationship with Perraud's student Max Claudet (Figure 1). Claudet shared Franche-Comté loyalties with Perraud and Pasteur. He was a sculptor and ceramicist whose works were often exhibited in the Paris Salon. He lived in Salins-les-Bains where Pasteur had undertaken some of his field experiments in 1860. Because of his numerous, colourful ceramic sculptures and plates in low- and high-relief figures with glazes applied like paint to convey pictorial scenes, Claudet was sometimes called the Comtois Palissy. These ceramics included subjects both classical and folksy including David, Hermes and The Temptation of Saint Anthony as well as Les sabots de Noël and Le vigneron du Jura taillant un échalas. Claudet produced at least four different portrait busts of his mentor Perraud, and he published a book about him a year after his death.²

Figure 1.

Bust of Max Claudet by his teacher JJ Perraud, 1875. (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lons-le-Saunier). Photograph, 2013, by Arnaud 25, courtesy of Wikimedia Creative Commons licence.

Gifts of art to Pasteur's family

In 1883, when Claudet was working on a large commemorative ceramic platter celebrating Pasteur's achievements, Pasteur answered with seven or eight phrases Claudet's request for his four most important discoveries. He created four little clusters that were used verbatim on the finished piece. On 20 September, he wrote to Claudet intending to send a requested photograph of himself.³ On 22 October, Madame Pasteur wrote a personal note to Claudet, thanking him for a candy dish she had received from him and explaining she had heard indirectly that he did not yet have the needed photograph and that she was reminding Louis by postcard to send immediately the one that is ‘superior to others because it has not been retouched’ and she extended her personal greetings to Madame Claudet and their son Georges.⁴ In mid-November, Pasteur wrote to Claudet thanking him for two ceramic candy boxes, individually inscribed in the glaze to Madame Pasteur and to their granddaughter Camille. Whether Claudet might have asked for an evaluation we do not know, but we do know that Pasteur offered his opinion that the colours were more successful on the one for Camille.⁵

Honouring Pasteur's achievements in glazed ceramics

A month later, after receiving two examples of the large, elaborate plate celebrating his scientific achievements (58 cm diameter), Pasteur wrote another thank-you note that carried critical commentary as well. One of the plates has a three-quarter portrait of Pasteur's head in the centre and the other has a scene of his birthplace in Dole.⁶ The centres are surrounded by concentric rings holding cartouches, putti and curlicues. The innermost circle reads louis pasteur ne a dole jura le 27 decembre 1822. Next outward are four panels that read vins, bières, vers à soie; maladies, vaccins; acide racémique; ferments, vie sans air. In the wider outermost ring, eight putti in pairs hold four cartouches reading académie française, académie des sciences, grand croix légion d’honneur, académie de médecine (Figure 2). Pasteur graciously acknowledged receiving the two ‘beautiful plates’ and then continued in a very business-like manner. It is hard to tell whether he was responding rudely to a generous gift or had perhaps been asked to review an item going into production – or was their friendship so close that the apparent criticism was simply playfulness? ‘Your plates are quite successful. To tell the truth, I think I am less forbidding and hard than you have made me, but perhaps my debates at the academies have given me a reputation that is in harmony with your design. As to your colour question, I prefer the greenish one to the blue, as it is softer’.⁷

Figure 2.

Pasteur commemorative platter by Max Claudet, 1883, the green version. (Pasteur Institute, Paris.) Photograph © Institut Pasteur – Musée Pasteur.

Clearly Pasteur had definite opinions about art and he expressed them with his usual self-confidence. Yet he was always ready to share his praise for artists whose work he appreciated and to support their careers. His loyalty extended both to his compatriots including Claudet, Henner, Perraud and Pointelin but also to artists whose successes served his own agenda, like the eye-catching portrait busts created by his friend Paul Dubois.

Paul Dubois

The famous sculptor Paul Dubois was close to Henner and Pasteur, who had them both to dinner at his house in May 1880 just at the time when Dubois's recently completed bust of Pasteur was on exhibit at the Salon.⁸ Dubois's portrait busts were widely admired by subjects, critics and other artists. For example, Dubois's bust of Henner was prized so much by Henner that he kept it on display in his own studio; perhaps not surprisingly, Pasteur regarded it as ‘superb’.⁹

Dubois enjoyed a long and successful career as sculptor, painter and arts administrator. During the years of his friendship with Pasteur, he rose to the very top of the establishment art world in Paris. He had first entered the École des beaux-arts (EBA) as a student in 1858 but soon took off for Italy where he produced sculptures in a neo-Renaissance style (e.g. John the Baptist in 1861) that were exhibited to acclaim at the Salon and purchased by the State. He returned to Paris and the EBA around 1862. We have not been able to document when he and Pasteur met, but they were certainly acquainted by November 1865, when both were among the honoured guests of the Emperor and Empress for a week at the royal chateau of Compiègne. Also among the guests that week was the painter Paul Baudry (1828–1886).¹⁰ Just the prior Spring, Dubois's sculpture of the Florentine Singer had received a medal of honour at the Salon (Figure 3). The Comte de Nieuwerkerke (Superintendent of Art for the Emperor's Household and for various state-controlled art institutions) and Princess Mathilde Bonaparte (niece of Napoleon I) competed with each other to acquire the original.¹¹ Reproductions in various sizes also became quite popular. In 1873, Dubois became keeper of the Musée du Luxembourg. He succeeded Jean-Joseph Perraud as a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1876 and he became director of the EBA in 1878.

Figure 3.

Florentine Singer by Paul Dubois (1865). Photograph credit Text-Book of the History of Sculpture by Allan Marquand and Arthur L Frothingham (New York, 1912).

Vivacious, but refined portrait busts

Many of Dubois's portrait busts were widely appreciated – not only those of Henner and Pasteur – but also those of Dr Joseph Marie Jules Parrot of the Hôpital des Enfants (1829–1883) who, by chance, travelled with Pasteur to Edinburgh to celebrate the University's tri-centennial in April 1884, Paul Baudry, Charles Gounod (1818–1893), and Léon Bonnat (1833–1922), whose grand portrait of Pasteur was in the Salon of 1886. Early in the 20th century, the Encyclopaedia Britannica praised these busts as ‘remarkable alike for life, vivacity, likeness, refinement and subtle handling’.¹² Plaster versions of three of them (Pasteur, Baudry and Parrot) are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, gifts of Madame Paul Dubois in 1906.

Honouring Pasteur through art at Danish breweries

In September 1878, Pasteur gave approval for Dubois to accept a commission from Jacob Christian Jacobsen (1811–1887), the wealthy Danish industrialist known as JC, to create a life-size bust honouring Pasteur's contributions to the scientific analysis of the art of beer making.¹³ This Jacobsen had founded the Carlsberg Brewery in 1844 and established a research laboratory in 1875 to build on the scientific methods of working with yeasts that Pasteur had established. Jacobsen visited Pasteur in Paris on 8 May 1877.¹⁴ Jacobsen wrote to Pasteur ‘I should be much obliged if you would allow me to order from M Paul Dubois, one of the great artists who do France so much credit, a marble bust of yourself, which I desire to place in the Carlsberg laboratory as a sign of the services rendered to chemistry, physiology, and beer-manufacture, by your studies on fermentation, a foundation to all future progress in the brewer's trade’.¹⁵ On 8 December 1878, Pasteur wrote Jacobsen that he had already completed three sessions modelling for Dubois.¹⁶ The bust was completed in 1879 and exhibited in the Salon of 1880. In Copenhagen, the marble version was given pride of place in the laboratory's entrance hall and Pasteur received a plaster copy for himself. Jacobsen's son Carl (1842–1914) would install a bronze copy on the exterior of his own brewery (Figure 4). In 1882, Pasteur wrote to the elder Jacobsen thanking him for information about the placement of the bust in the laboratory and asked for a photograph of it in situ. Then Madame Pasteur joined her husband in expressing their thanks for the photograph.¹⁷

Figure 4.

Bronze replica of the 1879 bust of Pasteur by Paul Dubois, on a wall of the Carlsberg Brewery, Copenhagen. Photograph © The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Pasteur as promoter of himself and his friends

Pasteur was rarely inactive, even though he did muster the patience to sit for quite a number of portrait busts and paintings over the years. For example, he devoted significant attention trying to ensure that Dubois's piece would be well received at the Salon and in the press and also that Jacobsen, a patron to both Dubois and Pasteur, would get due credit. Such notices would, of course, enhance Pasteur's own reputation as well. Pasteur wrote to Dubois in mid-April 1880, gently suggesting the exact words Dubois could submit for the official catalogue:

An idea just came up that I must communicate to you right away, about the bust you have made of me, the very best, I’ve heard said by some artists, among all those so remarkable ones that your chisel has produced. How are you going to designate the bust in the Salon catalogue? My idea is that you could honour Monsieur Jacobsen by writing: Bust of Monsieur Pasteur. Commissioned by Monsieur Jacobsen for his laboratory at Carlsberg, just outside the city of Copenhagen, or something equivalent.¹⁸

Pasteur was also eager to ensure that the bust would receive favourable mention in the Parisian press, asking his son-in-law, René Vallery-Radot (1853–1933), to intervene with a potential reviewer.

Today, Paul Dubois delivered to the Salon my bust in marble to be substituted for the plaster one. The marble is total beauty. The great artist has outdone himself. It is life and thought itself. I would like the name of Monsieur Jacobsen to be glorified alongside that of Paul Dubois by an authoritative art critic. You are known at the newspaper Le Temps in which the Salon review is done by a writer of talent, Monsieur P Mantz. It would be very desirable that in speaking of Paul Dubois's work, Monsieur Mantz would relate a few lines about the bust's origin to indicate the enlightened generosity of this rich industrialist who is giving one and a half million francs for the construction of a laboratory dedicated to the advancement of the brewer's art. With this letter I am sending you a copy of my Études sur la Bière and a copy of my last pamphlet in which the dedication to Jacobsen reviews the facts for this honouring of Monsieur Jacobsen. Do me the kindness of getting these to Monsieur Mantz as a testimony of my own gratitude. I embrace you as I love you.

PS You read Le Temps. When Paul Mantz's notice appears, please let me know in which issue so that I can send it to Monsieur Jacobsen.¹⁹

Art and patronage at the Copenhagen Medical Congress of 1884

Whatever the outcome of this behind-the-scenes manoeuvring in 1880, Pasteur and JC Jacobsen continued to build mutual admiration and a warm relationship based on Jacobsen's generous bust commission to Dubois and on Pasteur's public statements about Jacobsen's recognition of institutionalized scientific research as the soundest basis for progress in industrial processes. In August 1884, both men took advantage of the International Medical Congress held in Copenhagen to draw the spotlight to their personal achievements. Pasteur was an official representative of France at the meeting (since his increasingly important achievements in medicine gradually displaced any concerns about his lack of a medical degree and clinical experience). The elder Jacobsen and his son Carl, after whom the original family business had been called Carlsberg, provided generous hospitality to the attendees and everyone was especially gracious to Pasteur and his family. Taking pleasure in art and art collections was a major activity for Pasteur in the Danish capital. Both Jacobsens were art collectors and their works were on display for the conferees. Additionally, after the conference Pasteur took the opportunity to make a special visit to the Thorvaldsen Museum where he viewed the plaster and marble works of the Danes' beloved sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844), along with antiquities and modern paintings the artist had collected personally.²⁰ Some regarded Thorvaldsen as the successor to the great Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova (1757–1822) whose work Pasteur himself had specifically sought out during a research trip to Vienna 30 years earlier.

Pasteur's work in science and medicine during the early 1880s

Pasteur's account of his pleasure at their reception in the Danish capital will be quoted at length shortly. But first we note some of the major events in Pasteur's life during the four years following the Salon of 1880. His sister died and his first grandchild, Camille Vallery-Radot, was born. He threatened to resign from the Academy of Medicine. He was challenged to a duel by Dr Jules Guérin (1801–1885) and managed to avoid it by a public apology. He began work on rabies. He performed the famous public test of his anthrax vaccination method at the farm of Pouilly-le-Fort. He received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour (having been honoured as Chevalier in 1853, Commandeur in 1868 and Grand Officier in 1878). He was honoured by Joseph Lister (1827–1912) and others at the 1881 International Medical Congress in London. Also in 1881, he was elected to the French Academy as one of its ‘forty immortals’. The French government, which had awarded him in 1874 a lifetime pension of 12,000 francs annually, increased the annual payment to 25,000 francs in 1883, transferable upon his death to his wife and then to his children.²¹

In July 1883 in Dole for a ceremony at which a commemorative plaque was placed on the house in which he was born, Pasteur spoke movingly about all he owed to his parents. According to Geison this Dole ceremony – along with his election to the French Academy and the 1892 jubilee ceremonies – were probably the most cherished of Pasteur's many honours and tributes.²² Then in September, one of his most promising disciples, the 27-year-old Louis Thuillier (1856–1883), died of cholera in Cairo, where he had been sent by Pasteur as part of a small group to find the germ of this disease. Pasteur's archrival Robert Koch (1843–1910) and his German research team were there at the same time and they put competitiveness aside to attend the young Frenchman's funeral, with Koch himself serving as one of the pallbearers.

In January 1884, a nearly 400-page anonymous biography of Pasteur was published under the title Histoire d’un savant par un ignorant which could be rendered as ‘A Layman's Story of a Scientist’ though the English translation (New York, 1885) carried a bland title, Louis Pasteur, His Life and Labours, and was credited on the title page to ‘His Son-in-Law’, that is, René Vallery-Radot. At the time of the 1884 Copenhagen congress, Pasteur's son Jean-Baptiste was living in Copenhagen where he served as Secretary of the French Legation to Denmark, having moved there in November 1883 from the legation at Rome.²³ In August 1884, Pasteur would be speaking about general principles of vaccination and about his results in making dogs resistant to an exposure of rabies virus. He would also mention the possibility of preventive methods against rabies in humans.

A most honoured guest

Arriving in Copenhagen about a week before his speech, he took an almost childish pleasure in the welcome he received, recording the details in a letter to Henri-Marie Bouley (1814–1885), Professor of Veterinary Medicine, President of the Academy of Sciences and an eminent rabies expert. Bouley had been publishing on this disease since the 1870s, a decade before Pasteur took up the topic, and he had recently supervised a doctoral thesis on rabies by Paul Gibier (1851–1900).²⁴ At this time, Bouley was chairing a commission appointed in May by the Ministry of Public Instruction – at Pasteur's own request – to verify Pasteur's rabies studies. The work continued while Pasteur was abroad.²⁵ On 4 August, Pasteur wrote Bouley from the Hôtel d'Angleterre in Copenhagen with an endearing mix of professional pride and personal delight:

My very dear colleague and friend,

We had a good trip, and our accommodation at the Hôtel d’Angleterre is especially comfortable, almost luxurious, thanks to M Jacobsen, the great brewer, who rented in this hotel rooms and salons for my wife and for me and the young Loir [ie Adrien Loir, Pasteur's twenty-one year old nephew being cultivated as Pasteur's closest aide, called ‘young’ to distinguish him from Pasteur's brother-in-law, dean of the science faculty at Lyons]. The Vallery-Radots are at my son's house with their nanny and their little girl. A two-horse carriage is at our disposal all day long. In a word, we have been received as princes. M Jacobsen lives at Carlsberg, a half hour from Copenhagen, where are found his magnificent brewery, his house filled with objets d’art, and a laboratory to cause envy among all of us chemists. It contains no less than two thousand ballons Pasteur [flasks for cultivating microbes in broth], everything practical for the study and conservation of yeasts. One reaches it by a rue Pasteur and in the library's hall stands the superb bust by Paul Dubois. Right next to the brewery is a facility for the export of beer which is pasteurized there with extreme care.

At the entrance of the chemin Pasteur, his son, a leading brewer himself, has erected the same bust by Paul Dubois (in bronze) on the outside of a building under a small pediment supported by two columns in green marble [Figure 4]. In our honour the French flag flies over the brewery and the house. We had dinner last night at Carlsberg. [Imagine] the Pompeian gallery, with flowers galore and electric light distributed everywhere, illuminating the walkways and all the cellars of the brewery. And this millionaire today, this great benefactor of Copenhagen, started as just a worker in his father's small brewery. He is a man of great nobility of feeling and whose wealth is explained by the steadfast preoccupation that prevails here of introducing every advance into brewing.

[Here the letter abruptly changes topics: ‘And, now, where are you on the rabies work?’ and continues with details about three rabbits trepanned on 13 July and other experimental matters].²⁶

Rabies shots will create new images of Pasteur in paintings

In Copenhagen in August 1884, when Pasteur spoke to professional colleagues about his progress in preventing rabies in dogs, neither he nor his colleagues was ready for experiments on human patients threatened by hydrophobia. Yet in less than a year, fate – and his pity for a boy from his beloved Alsace – would change all that. And with his first rabies patient, his work would burst forth from the quiet of the laboratory into the blaring headlines of the daily papers. In this discovery and its aftermath, Pasteur would capitalize on his personal relationships with three other artists to create portraits and scenes of his laboratory: Léon Bonnat, Albert Edelfelt (1854–1905) and Lucien Laurent-Gsell (1860–1944). Pasteur's varied relationships with these three artists, who were at career peak, midcareer, and early career, respectively, have been examined in our recent study, ‘Collaboration of Art and Science’. Through his cooperation with these three artists and with others who portrayed the triumph over rabies, he knowingly cultivated his own reputation and promoted a new image of French science internationally. Yet, even while accepting the service of artists, he did not neglect his opportunities to help their careers, for example, actively pursuing Albert Edelfelt's elevation to Chevalier of the Legion of Honour soon after Edelfelt's large portrait of Pasteur at work garnered major accolades on its appearance in the 1886 Salon.²⁷

Among the artists: The Copenhagen exhibition of French art

The passion for art that Pasteur shared with the two Jacobsens – both wealthy, both art collectors and both deeply appreciative of Pasteur's work – would continue into Pasteur's later years and beyond the senior Jacobsen's death in April 1887. In late 1887, Pasteur wrote the younger Jacobsen to thank him for sending two casts he had recently requested of the bust by Dubois commissioned by Jacobsen's father back in 1878. Of this bust, Pasteur remarked ‘along with the portrait in oil by Edelfelt, I know of no better likeness nor anything of better execution’.²⁸

In 1888, Pasteur served as the Honorary President of a committee of artists overseeing the representation of French art at the Danish National Exhibition mounted to celebrate the 25-year reign of King Christian IX. The activities were supported by Carl Jacobsen who also commissioned from Peder Severin Krøyer (1851–1909) a painted group portrait with Pasteur at the centre (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

PS Krøyer, The Committee for the French Art Exhibition in Copenhagen (1888), painted 1888–89. Photograph credit The Magazine of Art (1891).

The painting includes several artists in Pasteur's circle. Most of the men in the group can be identified. In alphabetical order, they are Barrias the sculptor, Besnard, Léon Bonnat, Carolus Duran, Cazin the landscape painter, Chaplain the medalist, Chapu, Cormon, Delaplanche the sculptor, Paul Dubois, JAJ Falguière, Charles Garnier, Gautherin, Léon Gérôme, Henri Gervex, Carl Jacobsen, Klein the Danish architect, PS Krøyer himself, Lucien Magne the architect, Antonin Mercié, Pasteur, Antonin Proust the well-known deputy, Puvis de Chavannes, Alfred Roll and Tuxen a Danish artist.²⁹ In Krøyer's honorific group portrait, Pasteur was literally surrounded by artists, several of whom were personal friends.

A cherished gift of art

Pasteur's appreciation for the Jacobsens' friendship and support was deep and genuine. Five years later, on the occasion of his own 70th birthday, Pasteur wrote to Carl, observing that there was no work by Perraud in his Copenhagen art museum. Pasteur gave him an especially treasured work of art: the original plaster maquette of Les Adieux by Perraud which Pasteur had received from Perraud himself.³⁰

With this emotion-laden gift of a work of art, we end our account of Pasteur's friendships with Claudet and Dubois. These relationships, like those with his other artist friends, illustrate some of the ways in which aesthetics, politics, patronage and regional loyalty were embedded in the works of art and in their genesis and reception. Pasteur acted as a patron of artists and in turn industrialist patrons supported his work and fostered his reputation through their gifts and their art collections. Although art could sometimes be a means to an end, beauty was for Pasteur a deep and powerful source of pleasure in itself. The way art even pulled Pasteur away from his laboratory was observed at the time of his death by an anonymous friend who wrote ‘though science claimed Pasteur as her own, a good deal of that leisure which he so grudgingly allowed himself was spent in the galleries of the Luxembourg’.³¹

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Kathryn Annette Clark, wife of the late Dr Richard E Weisberg, loaned Weisberg's research files to Dr Hansen. Her optimism and high spirits have sustained this effort to make parts of Weisberg's original research available to a scholarly public. Readers may also wish to visit ‘The Scholarly Legacy of Richard E. Weisberg (1943-2011): Medicine in Art in Nineteenth-Century France’ at . Editorial advice from Boaz N Adler, Roslyn Bernstein and Caitlin Hawke is greatly appreciated. For generously sending his book on Max Claudet, we thank Daniel Clot.

Funding

Hansen extends his special thanks to Dean Jeffrey M Peck of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences of Baruch College, CUNY, for a summer research stipend and for funding of travel to Finland and France. Support was also received from the PSC-CUNY Research Awards Program of the City University of New York.

Author biographies

Bert Hansen, PhD, is professor emeritus of history at Baruch College of the City University of New York. Recently he retired after 40 years of full-time teaching at Binghamton University in New York, the University of Toronto, New York University and The City University of New York. He was twice in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2009, he published Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media Images and Popular Attitudes in America. In 2014, Hansen keynoted conferences in Ulm, Germany and College Park, Maryland, with talks about the public understanding of science in mid-20th century America through innovative media including LIFE magazine and true-adventure stories in children's comic books. He has given presentations about Louis Pasteur's passion for the fine arts to the American Osler Society, the History of Science Society, the New York Academy of Medicine, the American Association for the History of Medicine and the School of Medicine of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Richard E Weisberg, PhD (1943–2011), had a long and successful career as a teacher and principal in the New York City public schools. In the 1980s, when he returned at midcareer to work towards a PhD degree, he undertook a study of medical portraiture in France in Hansen's course. In 1995, he completed a dissertation at New York University, ‘The Representation of Doctors at Work in Salon Art of the Early Third Republic in France’. In 2010, Weisberg and Hansen began working together on a joint study of Pasteur's friendships with artists, based in part on the dissertation research. Since Weisberg's unexpected death in 2011, Hansen has done new research and written three articles about Pasteur and art published jointly under both names.

References

Hansen B and Weisberg RE. Louis Pasteur's three artist compatriots – Henner, Pointelin, and Perraud: a story of friendship, science, and art in the 1870s and 1880s. Journal of Medical Biography.

Clot D and Saint-Sever G. Max Claudet: Statuaire et céramiste salinois. Salins-les-Bains, Pays du Livre, 2010.

Pasteur L. Correspondance 1840-1895. In: Vallery-Radot P (ed), 4 vols. Paris: B. Grasset, 1940–1951; III: 390–393 (September 14 and September 20, 1883, to Claudet). Hereafter, Pasteur's letters are cited simply as Corr. followed by volume number, page, letter's date and correspondent's name.

Arnulf

. À propos d'un document inédit sur Louis Pasteur. Histoire des Sciences médicales 1988; 22: 151–153.

Corr. III: 405, 13 November 1883, to Claudet. Photographs of the candy boxes are in D Clot and G Saint-Sever (Op. cit. ref. 2); pp. 60–61. Madame Pasteur's dish at the Pasteur Museum in Dole may be seen at http://www.musee-pasteur.com/index.php?id=339\.

Both plates have colour photographs in D Clot and G Saint-Sever (Op. cit. ref. 2); p. 63.

Corr. III: 406, 12 December 1883, to Claudet.

Corr. III: 135, 21 May 1880, to Henner.

Weisberg RE. The representation of doctors at work in Salon art of the early Third Republic in France. Doctoral thesis, New York University, 1995, p. 585.

10.

Vallery-Radot

. The life of Pasteur. Trans Devonshire RL, New York: Doubleday, Page, and Co, 1915, pp. 127.

11.

Web site of the Musée d'Orsay, entry for Paul Dubois, Chanteur florentin du XVe siècle, http://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/collections/catalogue-des-oeuvres/notice.html?no_cache=1&nnumid=6468.

12.

Paul Dubois in Encyclopaedia Britannica. 11th ed. New York: Encyclopaedia Britannica Company, 1910, 8, p. 624.

13.

Corr. III: 71, 24 September 1878, to JC Jacobsen.

14.

Wrotnowska D. Une amitié de savants, Pasteur et Jacobsen. Histoire des Sciences médicales 1970; 4: 131–142 (for new evidence that Jacobsen visited Pasteur on 8 May 1877, before any of the known correspondence between them).

15.

This letter is not included in Pasteur's collected Correspondance. It is quoted here from R Vallery-Radot (1915) (Op. cit. ref. 10), p. 401, where there are two misstatements. This page misdates this letter as 1879 (not 1878) and erroneously states that Jacobsen was ‘unknown to Pasteur’ at the time of the letter.

16.

Corr. III: 81, 8 December 1878, to Jacobsen.

17.

Lettres échangées entre JC. Jacobsen et Louis Pasteur au cours des anneés 1878-82. Copenhagen: Carlsberg Foundation, 1964, pp. 73–85 (17 May and 13 July 1882).

18.

Corr. III: 131–132, 17 April 1880, to Dubois.

19.

Corr. III: 135–136 (21 May 1880, to René Vallery-Radot).

20.

Vallery-Radot (1915) (Op. cit. ref. 10), p. 402.

21.

Geison GL. Louis Pasteur. Dictionary of scientific biography. Vol. 10. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974, pp. 350–416, at p. 352 (for the pension figures).

22.

Geison GL. 1974 (Op. cit. ref. 21); p. 408.

23.

Wrotnowska D. 1970 (Op. cit. ref. 14); p. 134.

24.

Hansen B. Picturing medical progress from Pasteur to Polio: a history of mass media images and popular attitudes in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009, pp. 101–121, for Gibier's importance as the founder of the first Pasteur Institute in America.

25.

Bazin H. Vaccination: a history from Lady Montagu to genetic engineering. Esher, UK: John Libbey Eurotext Limited, 2011, pp. 239–241.

26.

Corr. III: 435–436 (4 August 1884, to Bouley) where the editor mistakenly indicates that the host was Carl, the son of JC Jacobsen, rather than his father. But the text of the letter refers in the middle to ‘his son, a leading brewer himself’. D Wrotnowska 1970 (Op. cit. ref. 14); p. 137, also noticed this error but she misassigned the mistake to a letter of 20 December 1884.

27.

Weisberg RE and Hansen B. Collaboration of art and science in Albert Edelfelt's portrait of Louis Pasteur: the making of an enduring medical icon. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2015; 89: 59–91.

28.

Corr. IV: 233, December 30, 1887, to Carl Jacobsen.

29.

Phillips C. The modern schools of painting and sculpture, as illustrated by the ‘Grands Prix’ at the Paris exhibitions: Holland, Germany and Scandinavia. The Magazine of Art 1891, pp. 52–60, offers a numbered key on p. 59. A slightly different list of names appears in AB Price. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, I: 132 and 214–215.

30.

Wrotnowska D. 1970 (Op. cit. ref. 14); p. 139.

31.

Pasteur as an artist. New York Times, 1 October 1895, p. 30, reprinting the exact article, which had originally been untitled, from The Saturday Review 80: 2084 (5 October 1895), p. 430. We suspect that the writer might have been Jules Marcou, a friend of Pasteur since childhood.