Une communauté d’artistes et d’artisans français à l’étranger : Le cas des sculpteurs au château royal de Stockholm au XVIIIe siècle

A Community of French Artists and Craftsmen Abroad: A Case Study of theSculptors of the Royal Palace of Stockholm in the Eighteenth Century Following the approach of Linda Hinners’s research, this article comprises a study of French sculptors who worked on the construction of Stockholm’s royal palace in the eighteenth century. Indeed, between 1732 and 1765, the superintendent of royal buildings had recruited, through the action of social networks, thirty French sculptors. To encourage them to leave France, the superintendent offered them very attractive conditions of life and work, and the prospects of a career. Once there, these sculptors created the royal palace decoration from the sketches of the Swedish architects. Beyond their artistic ability, the Swedes utilized their great experience of construction work and technical know-how. Soon, they took over the management of the sculpture works and training of young Swedish craftsmen present on the site. With the recruitment of French experts, the Swedes therefore had skilled and knowledgeable work teams, which created autonomous production workshops. These latter also underwent a modernization process induced by the creation of the Superintendence of royal buildings and the Swedish Royal Academy. Thus, the French appear to have been the actors of a modern artistic policy that allowed Sweden to utilize the French aesthetic model.

The Beginning of a Long Series of Scientific Blunders

The Beginning of a Long Series of Scientific Blunders The enthusiasm that oft en characterizes researchers can at times distort certain preconceived convictions and deceive the scientist into believing that a controlled experiment has produced the correct result when, in fact, it is erroneous due to insufficient or incorrect data. This is the case for the discovery of a mysterious terra nobilis made by the chemist Torbern Olof Bergman. Bergman was born on March 20, 1735, in Katrineberg, Sweden. He was a chemist and mineralogist who became famous in 1775 for printing the most extensive tables of chemical affinity ever published at that time, and he was the first chemist to use letters of the alphabet as a notation system for chemical species. He took his doctorate at the University of Uppsala in 1758. After initially holding the professorship of physics and mathematics, he later took the chair in chemistry, which he retained for the rest of his life. Bergman made significant contributions to progress in quantitative analysis and metallurgy, and he developed a classification scheme of minerals based on their chemical characteristics. In 1777, Bergman confidently announced the result of an extremely expensive investigation. He studied the behavior of diamond with a blowpipe, and, aside from the presence of silicon, he seemed to have generated an unknown compound. He extracted the oxide of a metal from the diamonds, which, according to the custom of the time, he called terra nobilis. His discovery was quickly forgotten, not least because his life soon took a tragic turn. After marrying Margareta Catharina Trast in 1771, he enthusiastically continued his activities as a synthetic and analytical chemist, 3 but on July 8, 1784, at the age of only 49, he died in Medevi, Sweden. It is believed that he fell victim to poisoning from the chemical substances he used in his research. At the time of his death, he had been a member of the Royal Society of London and the Swedish Royal Academy for many years, and he was certainly one of the most famous chemists of his time.

The Berzelius centenary celebrations

ON 20 to 22 September 1948 forty representatives of foreign learned societies and universities were in Stockholm at the invitation of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science, the Royal Academy of Agriculture, the Caroline Institute and the Swedish Medical Association to join with them in their Commemoration of Jons Jakob Berzelius, who died on 7 August 1848. The opening meeting on 20 September was in the Town Hall, one of Stockholm’s most beautiful buildings, standing on the water’s edge, recalling in its outline the Doge’s Palace and St Mark’s at Venice. The ceremony began in the Blue Hall with a symphony by Lindblad played by the Stockholm Academic Orchestral Society, followed by a speech of welcome by the President of the Academy, Professor Gunnar Holim gren. Sweden was in mourning for the tragic death of Count Bernadotte, and the company stood in solemn silence for two minutes in his memory