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This monumental print depicts the rotunda housing the Felix Meritis Society’s weekly physics lectures, realized in 1788 in Amsterdam. At the central table, the physicist Jan van Swinden operates an instrument that belongs to the Society, a double-plate electrical machine. Demonstration of this kind offers the many members of Felix Meritis's Physics Department an occasion both to experience the spectacle of science and to socialize with one another. For electricity to eventually replace the lighting of the candlelit chandelier above, however, one would have to wait another century.
Reinier Vinkeles
Netherlandish, 1741-1816
after Pieter Barbiers I
Dutch, 1749-1842
and Jacques Kuyper
Dutch, 1761-1808
The Physics Room of the Felix Meritis Society, Amsterdam, with Jan van Swinden Lecturing
1791
Engraving
Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation
2009.5.4
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