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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: DRO-ECG |
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DUMAS, JEAN BAPTISTE ANDRE (1800-1884) , French chemist, was born at Alais (Gard) on the 15th of July 1800. Disappointed in his early hope of entering the navy, he became apprentice to an apothecary in his native town; but seeing little prospect of advancement in that calling, he soon moved to Geneva (in 1816). There he attended the lectures of such men as M. A. Pictet in physics, C. G. de la Rive in chemistry, and A. P. de Candolle in botany, and before he had reached his majority he was engaged with Pierre Prevost in original work on problems of physiological chemistry, and even of embryology. In 1823, acting on the advice of A. von Humboldt, he left Geneva for Paris, which he made his home for the rest of his life. There he gained the acquaintance of many of the foremost scientific men of the day, and quickly made a name for himself both as a teacher and an investigator, attaining within ten years the honour of membership of the Academy of Sciences. When approaching his fiftieth year he entered political life, and became a member of the National Legislative Assembly. He acted as minister of agriculture and commerce for a few months in 1850-1851, and subsequently became a senator, president of the municipal council of Paris, and master of the French mint; but his official career came to a sudden end with the fall of the Second Empire. He died at Cannes on the rrth of April 1884. Dumas is one of the most prominent figures in the chemical history of the middle part of the 19th century. He was one of the first to criticize the electro-chemical doctrines of J. J. Berzelius, which at the time his work began were widely accepted as the true theory of the constitution of compound bodies, and opposed a unitary view to the dualistic conception of the Swedish chemist. In a paper on the atomic theory, published so early as 1826, he anticipated to a remarkable extent some ideas which are frequently supposed to belong to a later period; and the continuation of these studies led him to the ideas about substitution (" metalepsis ") which were developed about 1839 into the theory (" Older Type Theory ") that in organic chemistry there are certain types which remain unchanged even when their hydrogen is replaced by an equivalent quantity of a haloid element. Many of his well-known researches were carried out in support of these views, one of the most important being that on the action of chlorine on acetic acid to form trichloracetic acida derivative of essentially the same character as the acetic acid itself. In the 1826 paper he described his famous method for ascertaining vapour densities, and the redeterminations which he undertook by its aid of the atomic weights of carbon and oxygen proved the forerunners of a long series which included some thirty of the elements, the results being mostly published in 1858-186o. He also devised a method of great value in the quantitative analysis of organic substances for the estimation of nitrogen, while the classification of organic compounds into homologous series was advanced as one consequence of his researches into the acids generated by the oxidation of the alcohols. Dumas was a prolific writer, and his numerous books, essays, memorial addresses, &c., show him to have been gifted with a clear and graceful style. His earliest large work was a treatise on applied chemistry in eight volumes, the first of which was published in 1828 and the last twenty years afterwards. In the Essai de statique chimique des eetres organises (1841), written jointly with J. B. J. D. Boussingault (1802-1887), he treated the chemistry of life, both plant and animal; this book brought him into conflict with Liebig
DU MAURIER, GEORGE LOUIS PALMELLA BUSSON (1834-1896), British artist and writer, was born in Paris. His father, a naturalized .British subject, was the son of emigres who had left France during the Reign of Terror and settled in London. In Peter Ibbetson, the first of the three books which won George Du Maurier late in life a reputation as novelist almost as great as he had enjoyed as artist and humorist for more than a generation, the author tells in the form of fiction the story of his singularly happy childhood. He was brought to London, in-deed, when three or four years old, and spent in Devonshire Terrace and elsewhere two colourless years; but vague memories of this period were suddenly exchanged one beautiful day in June " the first day of his conscious existence "for the charming realities of a French garden and " an old yellow house with green shutters and mansard roofs of slate." Here, at Passy, with his " gay and jovial father " and his young English mother, the boy. spent "seven years of sweet priceless home-lifeseven times four changing seasons of simple genial prae-Imperial Frenchness." The second chapter of Du Maurier's life had for scene a Paris school, very much in the style of that "Institution F. Brossard " which he describes, at once so vividly and so sympathetically, in The Martian; and like "Barty Josselin's"schoolfellow and biographer, he left it (in 1851) to study chemistry at University College, London, actually setting up as an analytical chemist afterwards in Bucklersbury. But this was clearly not to be his metier, and the year 1856 found him once more in Paris, in the Quartier Latin this time, in the core of that art-world of which in Trilby, forty years later, he was to produce with pen and pencil so idealistic and fascinating a picture. Then, like "Barty Josselin" himself, he spent some years in Belgium and the Netherlands, experiencing at An twerp in 1857, when he was working in the studio of van Lerius, the one great misfortune of his lifethe gradual loss of sight in his left eye, accompanied by alarming symptoms in his right. It was a period of tragic anxiety, for it seemed possible that the right eye might also become affected; but this did not happen, and the dismal cloud was soon to show its silver lining, for, about Christmas-time 1858, there came to the forlorn invalid a copy of Punch's Almanac, and with it the dawn of a new era in his career. There can be little doubt that the study of this Almanac, and especially of Leech's drawings in it, fired him with the ambition of making his name as a graphic humorist; and it was not long after his return to London in 186o that he sent in his first contribution (very much in Leech's manner) to Punch. Mark Lemon, then editor, appreciated his talent, and on Leech's death in 1865 appointed him his successor, counselling him with wise discrimination not to try to be "too funny," but "to undertake the light and graceful business" and be the "romantic tenor" in Mr Punch's little company, while Keene , as Du Maurier puts it, " with his magnificent highly-trained basso, sang the comic songs." These respective roles the two artists continued to play until the end, seldom trespassing on each other's province; the "comic songs" finding their inspiration principally in the life of the homely middle and lower middle classes, while the "light and graceful business" enacted itself almost exclusively in "good Society." To a great extent, also, Du Maurier had to leave outdoor life to Keene , his weak sight making it difficult for him to study and sketch in the open air and sunshine, thus cutting him off, as he records regretfully, from "so much that is so popular, delightful and exhilarating in English country life "hunting and shooting and fishing and the like. He contrived, however, to give due attention to milder forms of outdoor recreation, and turned to good account his familiarity with Hampstead
Of Du Maurier's life during the thirty-six years of his connexion with Punch there is not, apart from his work as an artist, much to record. In the early 'sixties he lived at 85 Newman Street in lodgings, which he shared with his friend Lionel Henley, after-wards R.B.A., working hard at his Punch sketches and his more serious contributions to Once a Week and the Cornhill Magazine. After his marriage with Miss Emma Wightwick in 1862 he took a spacious and pleasant house near Hampstead
It is impossible, in considering Du Maurier's work, to avoid comparing it with that of Leech and Keene, the more so that in his little book on Social Pictorial Satire he himself has set forth or suggested the points both of resemblance and of difference. Like Keene, though Keene's marvellous technique was his despair, Du Maurier was a much more finished draughtsman than John Leech, but in other respects he had less in common with the younger than with the older humorist. He shows himself, in the best sense, a man of feeling in all his work. He is clearly himself in love with " his pretty woman," as he calls herevery pen-stroke in his presentment of her is a caress. How affectionate, too, are his renderings of his fond young mothers and their big, handsome, simple-minded husbands; his comely children and neat nurserymaids; even his dogshis elongated dachshunds and magnificent St Bernards! And how he scorns the snobs and philistinesSir Gorgius Midas and Sir Pompey Bedell, Grigsby and Cadby, Soapley and Toadson! How merciless is his ridicule of the aesthetes of the 'eightiesMaudle and Postlethwaite and Mrs Cimabue Brown! Even to Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns, his most conspicuous creation, his satire is scarcely tempered, despite her prettiness. He shows up unsparingly all her unscrupulous little ways, all her cynical, cunning little wiles. Like Leech, he revelled in the lighter aspects of lifethe humours of the nursery, the drawing-room, the club, the gaieties of the country house and the seasidewithout being blind to the tragic and dramatic. Just as Leech could rise to the height of the famous cartoon " General Fevrier turned Traitor," so it was Du Maurier who inspired Tenniel in that impressive drawing on the eve of the Franco-German War, in which the shade of the great Napoleon is seen warning back the infatuated emperor from his ill-omened enterprise. In his tender drawings in Once a Week, also, and in his occasional excursions into the grotesque in Punch, such as his picture of " Old Nickotin stealing away the brains of his devotees," he has given ample proof of his faculty for moving and impressive art. The technique of Du Maurier's work in the 'eighties and the 'nineties, though to the average man it seems a marvel of finish and dexterity, is considered by artists a falling off from what was displayed in some of his earlier Punch drawings, and especially in his contributions to the Cornhill Magazine and Once a Week. His later work is undoubtedly more mannered, more " finicking," less simple, less broadly effective. But it is to his fellow-craftsmen only and to experts that this is noticeable. A quaint tribute has been paid to the literary talent shown in Du Maurier's inscriptions to his drawings by Mr F. Anstey (Guthrie
angel
Herbert Beerbohm Tree, at the Haymarket, with immense popular success. Some striking examples of Du Maurier's work for Once a Week and the Cornhill Magazine are included in Gleeson White's English Illustrators of the Sixties. The following is a list
chief
Some of his Punch drawings have been reproduced also in The Collections of Mr Punch (188o) Society Pictures from Punch (189o) ; A Legend of Camelot (189o). To his Social Pictorial Satire (189o) reference has been made. He contributed two essays upon book illustration
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