There is an almost psychedelic aspect to this image of light refracted through a soap bubble that dates from 1868.
Rene-Henri Digeon was a French intaglio printer and engraver who won First Prize at the International Exposition held in Paris in 1855. Digeon illustrated Amedee Guillemin's popular textbooks Les phenomenes de la physique (1868) and Le monde physique (1882).
Scientists in the late 19th century proposed various theories of optics and, even when those theories were superseded by new information they left traces in art. The long-lived chemist Michel-Eugene Chevreul (1786-1899) developed a color system that was the basis of pointillism, a style of painting employed by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in 1886. He also created a type of soap bubble made from animal fats and salt.
The craze for all things Japanese was named Japonisme by the French art critic Philippe Burty in 1872. Later that year Digeon made his Andromeda meteor, a net of glitter that showers down from an ink-blue night sky. It is likely Digeon had seen the labums by Japanese print makers Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige that were as inspirational to French artists as Chevreul's optics.
"I saw a star slide down the sky,
Blinding the north as it went by,
Too burning and too quick to hold,
To lovely to be bought or sold,
Good only to be made wishes on,
And then forever to be gone."
- Sara Teasdale, Collected Poems, Cotchogue, N.Y., Buccaneer Books: 1996
Images:
1. Rene Henri Digeon - Light distribution on a soap bubble - Plate VI from Le monde physique, The Wellcome Collection, London.
2. Rene Henri Digeon - Andromedid Meteors, November 27, 1872, Le monde physique, Wellcome Collection, London.