A Farting Knight

On Sir John Hippisley (1748-1825)

The Eccentricity label writer, of course, is much too polite to point out that Sir John Hippisley is farting, or being made to fart (scientifically), in the caricature print by the satirical artist Gillray (in the exhibn, inv no 11538, with picture). Perhaps he wants the visitor to notice the billowing clouds for himself and thus save the trouble of deciding what word should be used in curatorial parlance instead of farting.

I don’t know if he’s also being polite in saying it’s laughing gas, that was certainly all the rage at the time, though Hippisley is not laughing and there’s no ambiguity about the effect the print concentrates upon; Hippisley’s trousers are well exploded and several audience members are holding their noses. It illustrates the subtitle of the print, “an Experimental Lecture on the Powers of Air”.

Hippisley Farting

New Discoveries in Pneumaticks! - or - an Experimental Lecture on the Powers of Air.', by James Gillray, London, 1802

Sir John Coxe Hippisley (1748-1825) was an Oxford-educated barrister, a politician and diplomat and member of parliament, one of the governers of the Royal Institution (where the demonstration in the print is taking place), a patron of science, and a leading westcountry gent : all told, a very busy and distinguished man — definitely the sort of chap you want to see farting, or being made to fart (scientifically). One of the scientists he patronised was his own much younger wife, Elizabeth Ann, nee Horner, who was something of an amateur chemist and mineralogist, and a collector of geological and mineral specimens. I suspect she stayed in the fresh air of the country while he was farting about… I mean being a very busy man in London… and so he encouraged her to keep out of mischief by pursuing this hobby, and got several of his scientific friends (like Humphry Davy, Charles Hatchett, and William Allen) to send her specimens or write her letters containing advice. We have these letters in the Museum’s manuscript collection.

the Museum actually has a number of things connected with Hippisley, if a little tangentially, because the first Curator R. T. Gunther got to know the Horner family, Hippisley’s wife’s relatives, and with Gunther’s typical magpieishness acquired both for himself and for the Museum a very mixed bag of things from them. Notably he purchased Lady Hippisley’s geological and mineral collection, and although he sold the collection on, he kept the original papers that were with it, which eventually came to the Museum with Gunther’s archives. Directly for the Museum he acquired some chemical apparatus from the private laboratory at the Horners’ house, Mells Park, Somerset, which had probably been used by Lady H, though several other 19th-century members of the Horner family were scientists too. He also possessed a quantity of political and electioneering papers of Sir John Hippisley, which are also now the property of the Museum, though of course of no relevance to us. They are on permanent deposit at the record office in Ipswich, which is where his constituency was when he was an MP.

There’s another eccentric story behind the print: one of the museum’s versions of it has Hippisley’s famous fart cut away, and replaced by something less cloudy-looking (a vain and pointless exercise, since the idea that you can disguise a real trouser-ripping ‘hippisley’ [as they’ll be known hereafter] is as well-known a fallacy as a chinese-typewriter) – actually the inset looked even more disgusting than what it was meant to replace! Obviously some previous owner was as delicate in his sensitivities about such things as our esteemed colleague; BUT, as I understand it, when our Collections Manager some time ago came to take this doctored print out of its frame, lo and behold beautifully preserved beneath it was a second copy intact, with colours and fart as fresh as the day they were done (and, I think she said, a sort of kind of faint fleeting could-it-possibly-really-be whiff of something, just momentarily, as she lifted the cover). This perfect version is (I believe) the one being used in the exhibition. The Collections Manager’s inventory entry for it also, rather coyly, mentions neither Hippisley nor his fart.