Thomas Ralph Merton
Encyclopedia
Sir Thomas Ralph Merton KBE
, DSc
, FRS (1888–1969) was an English
physicist
, inventor and art collector. He is particularly noted for his work on spectroscopy and diffraction gratings.
, Surrey
, Thomas Ralph Merton was the only son of Emile Ralph Merton and Helen, daughter of Thomas Meates, a descendant of Sir Thomas Meutas, Secretary to Sir Francis Bacon. Emile Merton was for a time in the family metal trading business as a partner in Henry R. Merton & Co. which was started in London by his eldest brother in 1860. Another brother William Ralph Merton
founded the Metallgesellschaft
in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1881, which became the second largest company in Germany and the largest non-ferrous mining company in the world. The two companies worked closely with one another, along with the American Metal Company in New York
.
Thomas was educated at Farnborough School and Eton College
, where Dr T. C. Porter, the physics master, encouraged him to begin research. Between leaving Eton in 1905 and going up to Balliol College, Oxford
, in 1906, he worked at King's College London
. He went to Balliol with distinguished fellow Etonians Julian Grenfell
, Ronald Knox
, and Julian Huxley
.
In view of his delicate health and his promise as a scientist
, Oxford allowed Merton to go straight to a research thesis without taking his final exams; this was an unusual privilege. His investigation of the properties of solutions of caesium
nitrate
earned him a BSc
in 1910. Meanwhile, he had been reading widely and conceived many ideas for improving the techniques of spectroscopy
. While still a schoolboy he had set up a room in his father's house as a primitive laboratory.
In 1912 he married Violet Marjory Harcourt Sawyer, and moved — with his laboratory in tow — to his London house, on Gilbert Street.
, which were to be the main fields of his investigations. His early papers were distinguished by the beauty and accuracy of his experimental techniques. In 1916 he obtained his DSc
from Oxford and was appointed lecturer in spectroscopy at King's College London. In the same year his first joint paper with his friend J. W. Nicholson appeared. It was a fortunate chance which brought together Nicholson's brilliant mathematical analysis and Merton's experimental skill. The paper dealt with the broadening of spectral line
s in a condensed discharge. By an ingenious technique Merton measured the discontinuities in the lines due to their partial breaking up into components under the influence of the magnetic field
between adjacent atoms. The two men applied the same technique to the measurement of the spectra of hydrogen and helium, reproducing the distribution of intensity of some stellar lines in the laboratory for the first time.
The First World War scarcely interrupted these researches. Merton, having been rejected for active service on grounds of health, was commissioned in 1916 as a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in the secret service, the first scientist to be so appointed. His success in identifying the secret ink carried by German spies in their clothing, and inventing a new means of secret writing, won a mention in dispatches.
In 1919 Balliol
elected Merton to a research fellowship and Oxford made him reader (from 1923 professor) in spectroscopy. He worked on a series of problems, usually with a young student as his assistant. He was elected to the Royal Society
in 1920 and in 1922, with Sydney Baratt, gave the society's Bakerian lecture, on the spectrum of hydrogen. They cleared up a number of discrepancies in the secondary spectrum of hydrogen which were shown to be due to the hydrogen molecule, and they also showed the profound influence that traces of impurities can exert on gas spectra. In 1923 Merton left Oxford to live at Winforton House in Herefordshire
, the estate he had acquired with 3 miles of salmon fishing on the Wye
. He was a good shot and a most skilful fisherman. He transferred his laboratory to Winforton, so that he was able to combine a sporting life with his scientific research.
s were one of his lifelong interests and here his inventive genius best showed itself. The rarity and expense of good diffraction gratings led him to devise, in 1935, a method of copying them without loss of optical quality, by applying a thin layer of a cellulose
ester
solution to an original plane grating. When the solvent had evaporated he detached this pellicle and applied its grooved surface to a moist gelatine film on a glass plate. When dry, the gelatine bore a faithful record of the original rulings.
In 1948 Merton made an important basic advance in the art of ruling diffraction gratings. Since 1880 these had been ruled groove by groove by the method used by Rowlands
. In place of this, Merton ruled a very fine helix continuously on a steel cylinder which he then opened out upon a plane gelatine-coated surface by his copying method. No lathe could, however, rule a helix free from errors of pitch and these Merton eliminated by an ingenious device. It consisted of a ‘chasing lathe’ by which he cut a secondary helix on the same cylinder with a tool mounted on a ‘nut’ lined with strips of cork pressed upon the primary lathe-cut helix. Periodic errors were thus averaged and eliminated by the elasticity of the cork.
Merton handed these processes over to the National Physical Laboratory
(NPL) for further development and they formed the basis of a considerable research programme. The ‘blazed
’ gratings made by the Merton–NPL method were of great value in making available cheap infra-red spectrometers of high resolving power for research and industry, while long gratings ruled by this method came into use for engineering measurement and machine tool control.
asked if he could achieve such a long afterglow. Merton was able to reply by return of post, and soon after was asked to join the air defence committee where he learned that his discovery had made possible the two-layer long-persistence radar
screens which helped to bring victory in the Battle of Britain
.
His other wartime inventions included a black paint which reduced the proportion of light reflected from bombers in a searchlight to less than one per cent; the use of nitrous oxide
in the fuel to accelerate fighter aircraft; and a diffraction rangefinder for fighters, which was used against doodlebug
s.
. The income of all the society's funds showed a large increase during his treasurership.
paintings. He began to make a remarkable collection of pictures of the period 1450–1520. From 1944 until his death he was a member of the scientific advisory board of the National Gallery
, and its chairman from 1957 to 1965. He was also a trustee of the gallery, and of the National Portrait Gallery from 1955 to 1962. Merton was knighted in 1944 for his services during the war and in 1956 was appointed KBE. He was awarded the Holweck Prize
in 1951 and the Rumford medal
of the Royal Society in 1958.
In making his collection Sir Thomas followed his own interests and every work in it represents the personal taste of its owner, be the subject sacred or secular. As most of the works belong to the period of 1450 to 1520, the collection has great homogeneity and, in spite of the self-imposed limit of time, great diversity of subjects and techniques. No picture has been admitted merely because of size or with the intention of filling a certain space, but each has been selected for its pigmentary quality and with the determination to exclude anything that falls short of a high standard of perfection.
Preference is given to portraits which in expression, deportment and costume, convey a very clear idea of the life, taste and colour of their period... Next come the group of devotional pictures on a small scale, intended originally for the privacy of the home rather than public worship... A few pictures fascinate by their narrative as the predella by Fungai or the three Cassoni as do the drawings by being preparatory studies for the more elaborate works.
Twenty-two of the works, including drawings, were Italian, and ten of the northern schools.
Merton's instinctive connoisseurship is indicated by the distinction of so many of his acquisitions. The clou of his Italian pictures was the Botticelli Portrait of a Youth, now on loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, which had been in the Newborough collection: this cost £17,000 in 1941. He owned cassone panels formerly in the collections of Otto H. Kahn
and Lord Crawford, as well as Fungai's predella panel of the Martyrdom of Saint Clement, now reunited with an erstwhile companion in the City Art Gallery, York
. The Madonna and Child with a Donor by Bartolommeo Montagna, now in the Walker Art Gallery
, Liverpool
, is one of the most beautiful of that Vicentine master's creations and was the finest picture from the collection of Dr. Alfred Mond to be withheld from his bequest to the National Gallery. Signorelli's exceptional chalk study of a young warrior was sold by private treaty through Christie's
, also to the Walker Art Gallery, in 1980. Of the northern pictures seven were portraits, the earliest being the Portrait of a Man formerly believed to be Guillaume Fillastre
, long on loan to the National Gallery, now thought to be by a close follower of Rogier van der Weyden: purchased for £18,500 in 1940, this was sold in lieu of taxation through Christie's in 1987 and is now in the Courtauld Institute. The Behams catalogued below, which Scharf's erroneously ascribed to Mielich, were appropriately complemented by portraits by two of the artist's German contemporaries, Cranach
and Hans Krell
. Sir Thomas knew how important a contribution frames could make to the impact of his pictures, and in this respect was well served by Pollak
, the framer who was admired by other major collectors of his generation.
Some sense of what pictures meant to Merton is suggested in two passages in the notebook in which he recorded certain thoughts.
"'Signal to noise ratio' is a term often used in physics. In fact it applies to everything we try to understand and measure, from the precision with which the deflection of a galvanometer can be read to the amount we can grasp of a conversation at a cocktail party, where the signal is what someone is saying to us and the noise is the integrated chatter of the other guests. It applies also to the fine arts. In what is perhaps one the greatest of all works of art, Michelangelo's Pietà
in St. Peter's
, it is nearly all signal and no noise, while in the work of the action painters it is all noise and no signal. There is nothing new in the products of the action painters. Leonardo da Vinci in his notes says that 'if you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to different landscapes adorned with mountains etc., etc., and an infinite number of things which you can reduce into separate and well-conceived forms.'"
"In these days of 'Do-it-yourself' we are expected to 'reduce into separate and well-conceived forms' ourselves. Some of us prefer to have it done for us by a great artist."
His collection showed that Sir Thomas could fairly be stated to have admired great artists. But his desire for possession was not unlimited:
"Pictures are like women. There are quite a number of them which one can admire without wanting to live with them."
. Its spacious rooms made an appropriate setting for his collection of pictures. As a man of considerable wealth, he maintained what was probably the last private physics laboratory in Britain. Papers and patents continued to appear, based on his researches there. In 1957 he had several serious operations and thereafter he rarely left his home, where he died on 10 October 1969.
Order of the British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...
, DSc
Doctor of Science
Doctor of Science , usually abbreviated Sc.D., D.Sc., S.D. or Dr.Sc., is an academic research degree awarded in a number of countries throughout the world. In some countries Doctor of Science is the name used for the standard doctorate in the sciences, elsewhere the Sc.D...
, FRS (1888–1969) was an English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
physicist
Physicist
A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...
, inventor and art collector. He is particularly noted for his work on spectroscopy and diffraction gratings.
Early life and education
Born in WimbledonWimbledon, London
Wimbledon is a district in the south west area of London, England, located south of Wandsworth, and east of Kingston upon Thames. It is situated within Greater London. It is home to the Wimbledon Tennis Championships and New Wimbledon Theatre, and contains Wimbledon Common, one of the largest areas...
, Surrey
Surrey
Surrey is a county in the South East of England and is one of the Home Counties. The county borders Greater London, Kent, East Sussex, West Sussex, Hampshire and Berkshire. The historic county town is Guildford. Surrey County Council sits at Kingston upon Thames, although this has been part of...
, Thomas Ralph Merton was the only son of Emile Ralph Merton and Helen, daughter of Thomas Meates, a descendant of Sir Thomas Meutas, Secretary to Sir Francis Bacon. Emile Merton was for a time in the family metal trading business as a partner in Henry R. Merton & Co. which was started in London by his eldest brother in 1860. Another brother William Ralph Merton
William Ralph Merton
Wilhelm Ralph Merton was a prominent and influential German entrepreneur, social democrat and philanthropist...
founded the Metallgesellschaft
Metallgesellschaft
Metallgesellschaft AG was formerly one of Germany's largest industrial conglomerates based in Frankfurt. It had over 20,000 employees and revenues in excess of 10 billion US dollars...
in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1881, which became the second largest company in Germany and the largest non-ferrous mining company in the world. The two companies worked closely with one another, along with the American Metal Company in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
.
Thomas was educated at Farnborough School and Eton College
Eton College
Eton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....
, where Dr T. C. Porter, the physics master, encouraged him to begin research. Between leaving Eton in 1905 and going up to Balliol College, Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
, in 1906, he worked at King's College London
King's College London
King's College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. King's has a claim to being the third oldest university in England, having been founded by King George IV and the Duke of Wellington in 1829, and...
. He went to Balliol with distinguished fellow Etonians Julian Grenfell
Julian Grenfell
The Honourable Julian Henry Francis Grenfell DSO , was a British soldier and poet of World War I.-Early life:Julian Grenfell was born at 4 St James's Square, London, the eldest son of William Grenfell, later Baron Desborough, and Ethel Priscilla Fane, daughter of Julian Fane...
, Ronald Knox
Ronald Knox
Ronald Arbuthnott Knox was an English priest, theologian and writer.-Life:Ronald Knox was born in Kibworth, Leicestershire, England into an Anglican family and was educated at Eton College, where he took the first scholarship in 1900 and Balliol College, Oxford, where again...
, and Julian Huxley
Julian Huxley
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS was an English evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis...
.
In view of his delicate health and his promise as a scientist
Scientist
A scientist in a broad sense is one engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge. In a more restricted sense, a scientist is an individual who uses the scientific method. The person may be an expert in one or more areas of science. This article focuses on the more restricted use of the word...
, Oxford allowed Merton to go straight to a research thesis without taking his final exams; this was an unusual privilege. His investigation of the properties of solutions of caesium
Caesium
Caesium or cesium is the chemical element with the symbol Cs and atomic number 55. It is a soft, silvery-gold alkali metal with a melting point of 28 °C , which makes it one of only five elemental metals that are liquid at room temperature...
nitrate
Nitrate
The nitrate ion is a polyatomic ion with the molecular formula NO and a molecular mass of 62.0049 g/mol. It is the conjugate base of nitric acid, consisting of one central nitrogen atom surrounded by three identically-bonded oxygen atoms in a trigonal planar arrangement. The nitrate ion carries a...
earned him a BSc
Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...
in 1910. Meanwhile, he had been reading widely and conceived many ideas for improving the techniques of spectroscopy
Spectroscopy
Spectroscopy is the study of the interaction between matter and radiated energy. Historically, spectroscopy originated through the study of visible light dispersed according to its wavelength, e.g., by a prism. Later the concept was expanded greatly to comprise any interaction with radiative...
. While still a schoolboy he had set up a room in his father's house as a primitive laboratory.
In 1912 he married Violet Marjory Harcourt Sawyer, and moved — with his laboratory in tow — to his London house, on Gilbert Street.
Spectroscopy research: 1913–1928
After 1913 a steady stream of papers came from Merton's private laboratory, in which he assembled the latest spectroscopic equipment. His early work was on the absorption spectra of solutions, but he soon changed to the spectra of gases and to astrophysicsAstrophysics
Astrophysics is the branch of astronomy that deals with the physics of the universe, including the physical properties of celestial objects, as well as their interactions and behavior...
, which were to be the main fields of his investigations. His early papers were distinguished by the beauty and accuracy of his experimental techniques. In 1916 he obtained his DSc
Doctor of Science
Doctor of Science , usually abbreviated Sc.D., D.Sc., S.D. or Dr.Sc., is an academic research degree awarded in a number of countries throughout the world. In some countries Doctor of Science is the name used for the standard doctorate in the sciences, elsewhere the Sc.D...
from Oxford and was appointed lecturer in spectroscopy at King's College London. In the same year his first joint paper with his friend J. W. Nicholson appeared. It was a fortunate chance which brought together Nicholson's brilliant mathematical analysis and Merton's experimental skill. The paper dealt with the broadening of spectral line
Spectral line
A spectral line is a dark or bright line in an otherwise uniform and continuous spectrum, resulting from a deficiency or excess of photons in a narrow frequency range, compared with the nearby frequencies.- Types of line spectra :...
s in a condensed discharge. By an ingenious technique Merton measured the discontinuities in the lines due to their partial breaking up into components under the influence of the magnetic field
Magnetic field
A magnetic field is a mathematical description of the magnetic influence of electric currents and magnetic materials. The magnetic field at any given point is specified by both a direction and a magnitude ; as such it is a vector field.Technically, a magnetic field is a pseudo vector;...
between adjacent atoms. The two men applied the same technique to the measurement of the spectra of hydrogen and helium, reproducing the distribution of intensity of some stellar lines in the laboratory for the first time.
The First World War scarcely interrupted these researches. Merton, having been rejected for active service on grounds of health, was commissioned in 1916 as a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in the secret service, the first scientist to be so appointed. His success in identifying the secret ink carried by German spies in their clothing, and inventing a new means of secret writing, won a mention in dispatches.
In 1919 Balliol
Balliol College, Oxford
Balliol College , founded in 1263, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England but founded by a family with strong Scottish connections....
elected Merton to a research fellowship and Oxford made him reader (from 1923 professor) in spectroscopy. He worked on a series of problems, usually with a young student as his assistant. He was elected to the Royal Society
Royal Society
The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...
in 1920 and in 1922, with Sydney Baratt, gave the society's Bakerian lecture, on the spectrum of hydrogen. They cleared up a number of discrepancies in the secondary spectrum of hydrogen which were shown to be due to the hydrogen molecule, and they also showed the profound influence that traces of impurities can exert on gas spectra. In 1923 Merton left Oxford to live at Winforton House in Herefordshire
Herefordshire
Herefordshire is a historic and ceremonial county in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes it is a NUTS 3 region and is one of three counties that comprise the "Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire" NUTS 2 region. It also forms a unitary district known as the...
, the estate he had acquired with 3 miles of salmon fishing on the Wye
River Wye
The River Wye is the fifth-longest river in the UK and for parts of its length forms part of the border between England and Wales. It is important for nature conservation and recreation.-Description:...
. He was a good shot and a most skilful fisherman. He transferred his laboratory to Winforton, so that he was able to combine a sporting life with his scientific research.
Contribution to diffraction gratings
There is a gap of nearly twenty years between Merton's scientific papers of 1928 and 1947. In this interval he was busy in the laboratory and was taking out patents for his inventions. Diffraction gratingDiffraction grating
In optics, a diffraction grating is an optical component with a periodic structure, which splits and diffracts light into several beams travelling in different directions. The directions of these beams depend on the spacing of the grating and the wavelength of the light so that the grating acts as...
s were one of his lifelong interests and here his inventive genius best showed itself. The rarity and expense of good diffraction gratings led him to devise, in 1935, a method of copying them without loss of optical quality, by applying a thin layer of a cellulose
Cellulose
Cellulose is an organic compound with the formula , a polysaccharide consisting of a linear chain of several hundred to over ten thousand β linked D-glucose units....
ester
Ester
Esters are chemical compounds derived by reacting an oxoacid with a hydroxyl compound such as an alcohol or phenol. Esters are usually derived from an inorganic acid or organic acid in which at least one -OH group is replaced by an -O-alkyl group, and most commonly from carboxylic acids and...
solution to an original plane grating. When the solvent had evaporated he detached this pellicle and applied its grooved surface to a moist gelatine film on a glass plate. When dry, the gelatine bore a faithful record of the original rulings.
In 1948 Merton made an important basic advance in the art of ruling diffraction gratings. Since 1880 these had been ruled groove by groove by the method used by Rowlands
Rowlands
Rowlands is a surname, and may refer to:* Clive Rowlands* David Rowlands * Elwen Rowlands* Gena Rowlands* Graham Rowlands* Hugh Rowlands* Jim Rowlands* John Rowlands * June Rowlands* Keith Rowlands* Mark Rowlands...
. In place of this, Merton ruled a very fine helix continuously on a steel cylinder which he then opened out upon a plane gelatine-coated surface by his copying method. No lathe could, however, rule a helix free from errors of pitch and these Merton eliminated by an ingenious device. It consisted of a ‘chasing lathe’ by which he cut a secondary helix on the same cylinder with a tool mounted on a ‘nut’ lined with strips of cork pressed upon the primary lathe-cut helix. Periodic errors were thus averaged and eliminated by the elasticity of the cork.
Merton handed these processes over to the National Physical Laboratory
National Physical Laboratory, UK
The National Physical Laboratory is the national measurement standards laboratory for the United Kingdom, based at Bushy Park in Teddington, London, England. It is the largest applied physics organisation in the UK.-Description:...
(NPL) for further development and they formed the basis of a considerable research programme. The ‘blazed
Blazed grating
A blazed grating is a special type of diffraction grating.Blazed gratings produce maximum efficiency at a specified wavelength; that is, a diffraction grating that is "blazed at 250nm" will operate most efficiently when light with a wavelength of 250 nm passes through the grating.Like standard...
’ gratings made by the Merton–NPL method were of great value in making available cheap infra-red spectrometers of high resolving power for research and industry, while long gratings ruled by this method came into use for engineering measurement and machine tool control.
Experiments with cathode rays
In the laboratory at his father's house Merton had bombarded various newly discovered phosphorescent powders with cathode rays. He was surprised to find that while all lit brilliantly, the afterglow was brief and feeble. By experiment, he discovered that this was because the excitation and emission lines of the spectra barely overlapped, and that by mixing suitable powders he could increase the afterglow. He realized that persistent afterglow could be got by a double layer of powders, in which the light emitted by the back layer excited the front layer, but as this technique seemed to have no practical use he forgot about it for thirty-three years, until 1938 when Sir Henry TizardHenry Tizard
Sir Henry Thomas Tizard FRS was an English chemist and inventor and past Rector of Imperial College....
asked if he could achieve such a long afterglow. Merton was able to reply by return of post, and soon after was asked to join the air defence committee where he learned that his discovery had made possible the two-layer long-persistence radar
Radar
Radar is an object-detection system which uses radio waves to determine the range, altitude, direction, or speed of objects. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain. The radar dish or antenna transmits pulses of radio...
screens which helped to bring victory in the Battle of Britain
Battle of Britain
The Battle of Britain is the name given to the World War II air campaign waged by the German Air Force against the United Kingdom during the summer and autumn of 1940...
.
His other wartime inventions included a black paint which reduced the proportion of light reflected from bombers in a searchlight to less than one per cent; the use of nitrous oxide
Nitrous oxide
Nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas or sweet air, is a chemical compound with the formula . It is an oxide of nitrogen. At room temperature, it is a colorless non-flammable gas, with a slightly sweet odor and taste. It is used in surgery and dentistry for its anesthetic and analgesic...
in the fuel to accelerate fighter aircraft; and a diffraction rangefinder for fighters, which was used against doodlebug
Doodlebug
Doodlebug or doodle bug may refer to:Zoology:* Antlion* Woodlouse* Armadillidiidae, the pill bug family in the woodlouse suborderGround vehicles:* Doodlebug , a self-propelled railroad vehicle...
s.
Treasurer of the Royal Society
From 1939 to 1956 Merton was treasurer of the Royal Society, where his knowledge and experience of business were of considerable benefit. He formed a committee of experts to control its finances, and it was on his initiative that charitable bodies were given power to invest in equities, where they had previously been limited to gilt-edged stockGilts
Gilts are bonds issued by certain national governments. The term is of British origin, and originally referred to the debt securities issued by the Bank of England, which had a gilt edge. Hence, they are called gilt-edged securities, or gilts for short. The term is also sometimes used in Ireland...
. The income of all the society's funds showed a large increase during his treasurership.
Art collection
In 1930 John, the eldest of the Mertons' five sons, brought home the drawing prize from Eton and this proved a turning point in both his and his father's lives. It awoke in Merton some latent interest and he spent months in Italy with his son seeing all the great collections of RenaissanceRenaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
paintings. He began to make a remarkable collection of pictures of the period 1450–1520. From 1944 until his death he was a member of the scientific advisory board of the National Gallery
National Gallery, London
The National Gallery is an art museum on Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The gallery is an exempt charity, and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media...
, and its chairman from 1957 to 1965. He was also a trustee of the gallery, and of the National Portrait Gallery from 1955 to 1962. Merton was knighted in 1944 for his services during the war and in 1956 was appointed KBE. He was awarded the Holweck Prize
Holweck Prize
The Holweck Prize is a major European prize for Physics awarded jointly every year by the British Institute of Physics and the Société Française de Physique . It is one of the four Grand Prix of the SFP and one of the four International Bilateral Awards of the IOP, consisting of a gold medal and a...
in 1951 and the Rumford medal
Rumford Medal
The Rumford Medal is awarded by the Royal Society every alternating year for "an outstandingly important recent discovery in the field of thermal or optical properties of matter made by a scientist working in Europe". First awarded in 1800, it was created after a 1796 donation of $5000 by the...
of the Royal Society in 1958.
In making his collection Sir Thomas followed his own interests and every work in it represents the personal taste of its owner, be the subject sacred or secular. As most of the works belong to the period of 1450 to 1520, the collection has great homogeneity and, in spite of the self-imposed limit of time, great diversity of subjects and techniques. No picture has been admitted merely because of size or with the intention of filling a certain space, but each has been selected for its pigmentary quality and with the determination to exclude anything that falls short of a high standard of perfection.
Preference is given to portraits which in expression, deportment and costume, convey a very clear idea of the life, taste and colour of their period... Next come the group of devotional pictures on a small scale, intended originally for the privacy of the home rather than public worship... A few pictures fascinate by their narrative as the predella by Fungai or the three Cassoni as do the drawings by being preparatory studies for the more elaborate works.
Twenty-two of the works, including drawings, were Italian, and ten of the northern schools.
Merton's instinctive connoisseurship is indicated by the distinction of so many of his acquisitions. The clou of his Italian pictures was the Botticelli Portrait of a Youth, now on loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, which had been in the Newborough collection: this cost £17,000 in 1941. He owned cassone panels formerly in the collections of Otto H. Kahn
Otto Hermann Kahn
Otto Hermann Kahn was an investment banker, collector, philanthropist, and patron of the arts.-Life and career:He was born on February 21, 1867, and raised in the city of Mannheim, Germany, to Jewish parents...
and Lord Crawford, as well as Fungai's predella panel of the Martyrdom of Saint Clement, now reunited with an erstwhile companion in the City Art Gallery, York
York Art Gallery
thumb|right|York Art Gallery and statue of William Etty, by Stanley HoweYork Art Gallery in York, North Yorkshire, England is a public art gallery with a collection of paintings, from 14th century to contemporary, and 20th-century ceramics...
. The Madonna and Child with a Donor by Bartolommeo Montagna, now in the Walker Art Gallery
Walker Art Gallery
The Walker Art Gallery is an art gallery in Liverpool, which houses one of the largest art collections in England, outside of London. It is part of the National Museums Liverpool group, and is promoted as "the National Gallery of the North" because it is not a local or regional gallery but is part...
, Liverpool
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
, is one of the most beautiful of that Vicentine master's creations and was the finest picture from the collection of Dr. Alfred Mond to be withheld from his bequest to the National Gallery. Signorelli's exceptional chalk study of a young warrior was sold by private treaty through Christie's
Christie's
Christie's is an art business and a fine arts auction house.- History :The official company literature states that founder James Christie conducted the first sale in London, England, on 5 December 1766, and the earliest auction catalogue the company retains is from December 1766...
, also to the Walker Art Gallery, in 1980. Of the northern pictures seven were portraits, the earliest being the Portrait of a Man formerly believed to be Guillaume Fillastre
Guillaume Fillastre
Guillaume Fillastre was a French Cardinal, canonist, humanist, and geographer.-Life:...
, long on loan to the National Gallery, now thought to be by a close follower of Rogier van der Weyden: purchased for £18,500 in 1940, this was sold in lieu of taxation through Christie's in 1987 and is now in the Courtauld Institute. The Behams catalogued below, which Scharf's erroneously ascribed to Mielich, were appropriately complemented by portraits by two of the artist's German contemporaries, Cranach
Lucas Cranach the Elder
Lucas Cranach the Elder , was a German Renaissance painter and printmaker in woodcut and engraving...
and Hans Krell
Hans Krell
Hans Krell Sr. was a German painter....
. Sir Thomas knew how important a contribution frames could make to the impact of his pictures, and in this respect was well served by Pollak
Pollak
Pollak is a surname, and may refer to:* Burglinde Pollak , German athlete* Jacob Pollak , Polish rabbi, founder of the Pilpul method of halakic study* Joachim Pollak , Austrian rabbi...
, the framer who was admired by other major collectors of his generation.
Some sense of what pictures meant to Merton is suggested in two passages in the notebook in which he recorded certain thoughts.
"'Signal to noise ratio' is a term often used in physics. In fact it applies to everything we try to understand and measure, from the precision with which the deflection of a galvanometer can be read to the amount we can grasp of a conversation at a cocktail party, where the signal is what someone is saying to us and the noise is the integrated chatter of the other guests. It applies also to the fine arts. In what is perhaps one the greatest of all works of art, Michelangelo's Pietà
Pietà
The Pietà is a subject in Christian art depicting the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus, most often found in sculpture. As such, it is a particular form of the Lamentation of Christ, a scene from the Passion of Christ found in cycles of the Life of Christ...
in St. Peter's
St. Peter's Basilica
The Papal Basilica of Saint Peter , officially known in Italian as ' and commonly known as Saint Peter's Basilica, is a Late Renaissance church located within the Vatican City. Saint Peter's Basilica has the largest interior of any Christian church in the world...
, it is nearly all signal and no noise, while in the work of the action painters it is all noise and no signal. There is nothing new in the products of the action painters. Leonardo da Vinci in his notes says that 'if you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to different landscapes adorned with mountains etc., etc., and an infinite number of things which you can reduce into separate and well-conceived forms.'"
"In these days of 'Do-it-yourself' we are expected to 'reduce into separate and well-conceived forms' ourselves. Some of us prefer to have it done for us by a great artist."
His collection showed that Sir Thomas could fairly be stated to have admired great artists. But his desire for possession was not unlimited:
"Pictures are like women. There are quite a number of them which one can admire without wanting to live with them."
Later life
In 1947 Merton bought Stubbings House, at Maidenhead Thicket, BerkshireBerkshire
Berkshire is a historic county in the South of England. It is also often referred to as the Royal County of Berkshire because of the presence of the royal residence of Windsor Castle in the county; this usage, which dates to the 19th century at least, was recognised by the Queen in 1957, and...
. Its spacious rooms made an appropriate setting for his collection of pictures. As a man of considerable wealth, he maintained what was probably the last private physics laboratory in Britain. Papers and patents continued to appear, based on his researches there. In 1957 he had several serious operations and thereafter he rarely left his home, where he died on 10 October 1969.
External links
- The Times (13 Oct 1969)