William S. Ladd Collection of Prints (Ladd Collection) consists of 671 prints, primarily portraits, dating from the 17th century through the early 19th century. In 1975, the Academy accepted the Ladd Collection as a gift from the Cornell University Medical College. William S. Ladd, the original donor, had been Dean of the Medical College and when his significant collection of prints came into the Medical College Library, Erich Meyerhoff, the Librarian, recognized its research value and the fact that such a collection properly belonged in a major research library. With the permission of the Dean of the Cornell University Medical College and the donor’s son, Dr. Anthony T. Ladd, Eric Meyerhoff offered the collection to the Academy. It was accepted and arrived in the Malloch Rare Book Room (now the Drs. Barry and Bobbi Coller Rare Book Reading Room) in May of 1975.
The prints themselves had been accumulated in the first half of the 20th century by William S. Ladd. He had purchased a great many of them as deaccessioned duplicates from the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Primarily portraits of significant and lesser known figures in medicine and science, the prints span a period from the early 17th century to the first half of the 19th century. The printing processes used to render the various images include etching, engraving, stipple, mezzotint, and lithography. Among the etchers, engravers, artists and lithographers are some very famous names, a history in fact of English and Continental art and printmaking, with a smattering of American efforts among the lot. For example, the portrait of John Syng Dorsey (1783-1818), a little known American surgeon who rated a footnote in Fielding Garrison’s An Introduction To The History Of Medicine, is an engraving after a painting by Thomas Sully (1783-1872). Sully, who had studied with Gilbert Stuart and Benjamin West, is best known for his famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware. The portrait of Charles Lucas (1713-1792), an Irish physician who did not even get a footnote in Garrison’s work, was engraved by James McArdell after a painting by Joshua Reynolds. James McArdell was an engraver who specialized in mezzotints.
The art of producing a mezzotint was brought to England in the late 17th century from the Low Countries, a fact which is acknowledged in a mezzotint portrait of Charles II dated 1669 by William Sherwin. Although mezzotints continued to be produced on the Continent, the English really made the technique their own and used it particularly for portraits. The classics of mezzotint engraving can be found in the engravings made after the paintings of Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds’ brushwork lent itself to the velvety quality of the mezzotint much more readily than the work of Gainsborough, for example, which required sharper edges in the transition from light to dark. James McArdell’s name is only one of a number of names of noted mezzotint engravers who all produced portraits after Reynolds and other masters. Another example is the mezzotint portrait of Tobias Smollet (1721-1771), a ship’s surgeon and the author of Roderick Random and Humphrey Clinker, after the painting by Reynolds.
G. Engelmann is a name that appears on a great many of the prints in the Ladd Collection as well. Godefroy Engelmann (1788-1839) was the earliest, and one of the most successful of the French lithographic printers. Invented in Germany by Aloys Senefelder at the end of the 18th century, lithography created a tremendous change in the printing industry. Essentially based upon the chemical principles that oil and water do not mix but will attract like substances, and that both will adhere to a porous ground, such as stone, the process came into widespread use in the 1820’s throughout Europe and America. Because lithography was a planographic method of printing, i.e. the printing surface was absolutely flat, cheaper and mass-produced paper could be employed. Furthermore, the lithographic stone could easily accommodate artistic media from watercolor washes to pen-and-ink and crayon. Lithographic printing was cheaper, and it was only after its development that it became possible to print inexpensive illustrated textbooks such as Gray’s Anatomy (1858).
On the whole, the images are quite spectacular and appealing not only because of their subject matter, but also because of their artistic merit. They have been used repeatedly to illustrate scholarly and trade books, exhibitions, and they have appeared in documentaries for television. These prints have an importance as artifacts, as well as works of art, because they lend a personal dimension to the study of the history of medicine and science.