Frost william adams (4 Ergebnisse)

hardcover. Zustand: fine. Illustrated. 92 illustrations. 554pp. 12mo, gilt-decorated leather, a.e.g. New York: Privately Printed for The Classics of Ophthalmology, Gryphon Editions, 1991. A fine copy. Facsimile of the 1887 First edition.

Blue hardback cloth cover. Zustand: Good. [First Edition]. G in good condition without dust jacket. Some marking to covers. Ex Royal College of Surgeons Ireland Library. 170mm x 120mm (7" x 5"). xx, 833pp. Illustrated with a chromograph and 91 engravings.

First Edition. 16 x 23cm 8pp card-covered exhibition catalogue, some wear and browning to wrappers. 31 works with titles and dates covering the works by the all 9 artists. Plus a Private View Card for Tuesday, January 11.

Zustand: Fine. Folio, 363 × 260 mm. Typed title mounted to verso of preliminary endpaper and signed in ink by William Adams Frost and Arthur W. Head. 107 finely executed original watercolour studies of the ocular fundus, approximately 77 × 77 mm to 133 × 133 mm, mounted recto only on 47 thick card leaves. Drawings numbered in ink 1-107; mounts numbered I-XLVII. Pencil note to mount XX: "Both these are mounted upside down." Occasional slight offsetting to black versos of facing mounts. Contemporary red morocco over thick bevelled boards, ruled and decorated in gilt and black; upper cover titled in gilt: "The Fundus Oculi. W. Adams Frost. (Original Drawings)." Spine in five compartments with raised bands gilt; two gilt clasps and catches; gilt edges and turn-ins. Extremities lightly rubbed. Frost trained at St George's Hospital, later serving as ophthalmic surgeon there and at Moorfields, and twice receiving the British Medical Association's Middlemore Prize. His atlas emerged during the rapid professionalization of ophthalmology in late Victorian Britain, when standardized visual documentation became central to clinical training across Britain and its global medical networks. His atlas stands in direct lineage from the ophthalmoscope invented in 1851 by Hermann von Helmholtz, the instrument that transformed medicine by allowing physicians, for the first time, to observe the living retina. With this development, the eye became the only site in the human body where blood vessels and neural tissue could be directly examined without surgery. By the late nineteenth century, retinal illustration had evolved into a precise diagnostic language, recording vascular distortion, haemorrhagic bloom, optic disc pallor, detachments, and inflammatory pathology with chromatic subtlety photography could not yet capture.These watercolours therefore functioned not as embellishment but as clinical instruments rendered in paint. The gradation of arterial red, the ochre and violet tones of hemorrhage, the delicate branching of retinal vessels — all required exacting colour fidelity. The original artwork preserves tonal and textural nuance inevitably flattened in print. Yet beyond their medical importance, the images possess striking aesthetics. Each retinal field, suspended against a deep black ground, forms a luminous circular composition. Viewed outside their clinical context, the plates bear a remarkable formal resemblance to early twentieth-century abstraction, anticipating in structure and chromatic intensity works such as Wassily Kandinsky's Several Circles (1926). The concentric containment of energy, floating chromatic discs, and radial linear networks place these scientific observations at the threshold of modern visual language. What began as diagnostic record assumes the compositional clarity of proto-abstract painting.…