A room with hallucinatory beings and weird furnishings. Watercolour by Auguste Laurent, 1844.

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<p>A workroom on the ground floor of an old house, with massive beams supporting the high wooden ceiling, a stone floor, and a large open fireplace: a similar room is shown in a painting of an alchemist's laboratory by E. Lomont, 1890 (Wellcome Library catalogue no. 45145i). The furnishings of the room (pans, mortar and pestle etc.) have human faces, and the figures have animal features. Left, a man dines on a frog, and another man (a portrait?) enters the room. Above the fireplace, a witch riding on a broomstick paired with another figure riding on an umbrella. Possibly a satire on a fellow-chemist (Dumas?), or a jeu d'esprit representing what outsiders imagined went on in the chemist's laboratory</p>

A room with hallucinatory beings and weird furnishings. Watercolour by Auguste Laurent, 1844.

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