Heerschop, Hendrick

Hendrick Heerschop, The Alchemist s Experiment Takes Fire, 1687. Courtesy of the Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections. 

Right The Alchemist s Experiment Takes Fire, by the 17th-century Dutch artist Hendrick Heerschop, shows a scene that was probably far from uncommon since alchemists worked with processes and materials whose explosive potential was only partially understood. 

FIGURE 79. Black-and-white reproduction of the color photograph of the 1671 oil painting, The Alchemist, by Hendrick Heerschop, in the Collection of Isabel and Alfred Bader. See color plates. The author expresses his gratitude to Dr. Bader for permission to reproduce the image and also for his helpful discussion of the Bush drawing (see Figure 75). 

Figure 79 was executed by Hendrick Heerschop in 1671 and is titled The Alchemist. It is a black-and-white reproduction of a color photograph of a beautiful oil painting from the Isabel and Alfred Bader Collection. The alchemist appears to smoke his pipe while watching a distillation. Hopefully, he is not distilling diethyl ether. 

Figure 2.9 Ihe Alchemist s Experiment Takes Fire by the seventeenth century Dutch artist Hendrick Heerschop. Accidents such as this must have been commonplace...

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