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Home » Image Gallery » Collection » Scientific Identity

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Scientific Identity

The portrait collection presented here in Scientific Identity was assembled by Bern Dibner. The images formed a fine research complement to the thousands of scientific books and manuscripts in the library he founded, the Burndy Library. Bern Dibner obtained most of the portraits during the 1940s from print dealers in Boston, London, and Paris. By 1950 he had about two thousand images and arranged them into ten scientific subdivisions: Botany, Chemistry, Electricity, Geology, Mathematics, Medicine, Philosophy, Physics, Technology, and Zoology. The portraits are of various types: woodcuts, copper and steel engravings, mezzotints, lithographs, oil paintings, and photographs. Many of them are images that were printed as separate items, used as gifts to send to colleagues and admirers. The exchange of portraits among scientists in the eighteenth century became a very popular form of correspondence. A number of prints also served as frontispieces of books and, unfortunately, a few of the prints in the collection had originally been bound as pages in books and removed some time in the distant past.

Bern Dibner donated a large part of the Burndy Library's collection to the Smithsonian Institution in 1974 and this formed the core of the new Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology. The portrait collection was part of the original gift but the image collection was eventually split between the two libraries. In the end, approximately one thousand portraits were transferred to the Dibner Library and the rest, including almost all of the over one hundred oil paintings, remained with Bern Dibner and are still at the Burndy Library and Dibner Institute of the History of Science and Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The people represented in the Dibner Library portrait collection are primarily scientists, natural philosophers, engineers, and inventors. There are a handful of individuals with no direct relationship to a scientific or technological enterprise, but they have been included for completeness. Individuals have been classified along broad disciplinary categories similar to those used by Bern Dibner.

-adapted from an essay by Ron Brashear taken from the original Scientific Identity website, produced with a grant from the Research Libraries Group
Displaying 1 - 80 of 1005

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Grid of Smithsonian Libraries Image Galleries
Portrait of Abbé Jean Antoine Nollet
Portrait of Abraham Gotthelf Kaestner
Portrait of Abraham Gotthelf Kaestner
Portrait of Abraham Gottlob Werner
Portrait of Abraham Gottlob Werner
Portrait of Abraham Ortelius
Portrait of Abraham Ortelius
Portrait of Abraham Rees
Portrait of Abraham Trembley
Portrait of Adam de Craponne
Portrait of Adolf von Baeyer
Portrait of Adolph Frank
Portrait of Adrien Marie Legendre
Portrait of Albert Abraham Michelson and Others
Portrait of Albert Abrarham Michelson
Portrait of Albert Einstein
Portrait of Albert Einstein
Portrait of Albert Einstein
Portrait of Albert Einstein
Portrait of Albert Einstein and Others
Removed from book: André Thevet, Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres, 1584. Livre III, p.121, X1 recto.Additional research fields: life sciences, mathematics, philosophy and physics.
Portrait of Albertus, Magnus
Portrait of Albrecht von Haller
Portrait of Albrecht von Haller
Portrait of Albrecht von Haller
Portrait of Albrecht von Haller
Portrait of Alessandro Cagliostro
Portrait of Alessandro Volta
Modern photographic print (of earlier photograph?).
Portrait of Alexander Graham Bell
Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt
Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt
Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt
Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt
Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt
Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt
Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt
Portrait of Alexandre Brongniart
Portrait of Alexandre Edmond Becquerel
Portrait of Alexis Bouvard
Portrait of Alexis Claude Clairaut
Portrait of Alexis Rochon
Portrait of Alfred Bernhard Nobel
Portrait of Alfred Swaine Taylor
Portrait of Alois Senefelder
Mounted on printed card with gilt decoration.
Portrait of Alois Senefelder
Portrait of Ambroise Paré
Portrait of Ambrose Godfrey
Portrait of Amerigo Vespucci
Portrait of Amerigo Vespucci
Portrait of André Jean François Marie Brochant de Villiers
Portrait of André Laugier
Portrait of André Marie Constant Dumeril
Portrait of André Thouin
Reproduction (of a drawing or etching?); generally considered to be a self-portrait.
Portrait of André-Marie Ampère
Portrait of André-Marie Ampère
Reproduction of an engraving; appears to have been cut from magazine.
Portrait of André-Marie Ampère
Reproduction (photocopy of a lithograph).
Portrait of André-Marie Ampère
Reproduction (of an engraving?); appears to have been cut from a magazine.
Portrait of André-Marie Ampère
Portrait of Andreas Vesalius
 Vesalius' face may have been put on the body of Melchoir von Brauweiler, the subject of the portrait.
Portrait of Andreas Vesalius
Portrait of Andreas von Ettingshausen
Portrait of Andrew Ure
Portrait of Angelo Secchi
Portrait of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, baron de l'Aulne
Portrait of Anthony Carlisle
Portrait of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
Portrait of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
Portrait of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
Portrait of Antoine Risso
Portrait of Antoine-François de Fourcroy
Portrait of Antoine-François de Fourcroy
Portrait of Antoine-François de Fourcroy
Portrait of Antoine-François de Fourcroy
Portrait of Antoine-François de Fourcroy
Portrait of Antoine-Henri Becquerel
Portrait of Antoine-Jean Letronne
Photographic print of engraved title page portrait for Felkel's Tafel aller einfachen Factoren… (Wien, 1776).
Portrait of Anton Felkel
Portrait of Anton Schrötter, Ritter von Kristelli
Portrait of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek
Portrait of Archimedes
Portrait of Aristotle
Portrait of Aristotle

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