The poor in western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

The new catalogue marks a definite stage in the development of the collection. In 1982, a new funding programme was introduced by the collection's original patron, now called SmithKline Beckman, and a new curator, Dr Diane Karp, was appointed to make acquisitions and prepare the exhibition here recorded. Of the works in the exhibition, no fewer than fifty-six (about one-third) were acquired under the new programme, and their quantity is more than matched by their quality. The collection now includes fine drawings by Abraham Bloemaert, Guercino, and Pierre-Alexander Wille (all acquired in 1984); rare prints by the Fontainebleau school (also 1984), Hans Burgkmair (1982), C. J. Visscher (1983), and Erich Heckel (1983); and eloquent photographs by Hugh Welch Diamond (1984), Diane Arbus (1984), and W. Eugene Smith (1981-84). All the works are reproduced in the catalogue. Also in the exhibition, but acquired too late to enter the catalogue, was the young (Sir) Thomas Lawrence's pastel of a mad girl, dated 1786, which came up for auction at Christie's, London, on 19 March 1985. The catalogue is organized in four sections: anatomy; healers (physicians, surgeons, tooth-drawers etc.); disease, disability and madness; and the context of life, birth, and death. However, the works are so different from each other that they shine as individual items rather than as members of a group. Of particular interest to this reviewer are the tribute to the founders of serum-therapy for diphtheria by Charles Maurin, c. 1895, in the form of a drawing and a somewhat divergent etching; and the watercolour depicting his own expected death by the obscure and extremely ill Ligurian artist Giovanni David, c. 1780-90, whose numerous sufferings (arthritis, dropsy, fevers) were the subject of a controversial pamphlet published in Genoa in 1790. These works are a challenge to the historian's subtlety in interpreting historical documents, but the analyses of them in the catalogue are masterly.