Portrait of Frederick Gowland Hopkins
Date
1938
Sitter
Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861 - 1947, British) , Biochemist
Creator
Meredith Frampton (1894 - 1984, British) , Painter
Object type
Archive reference number
Material
Dimensions
height (painting): 1110mm
width (painting): 990mm
width (painting): 990mm
Subject
Content object
Description
The subject is painted seated at a desk or laboratory bench. Hopkins wears a light yellow or cream suit with blue shirt, green tie and a darker green waistcoat. There are two papers in front of the scientist, on a blue blotter. One shows the wave-lengths of the absorption band seen by a spectroscope in light which has passed through a solution. Hopkins’ hand rests by a pencil on a pad headed ‘Lepidoporphyrin’, a term coined by him for the pigment found in butterfly wings and the subject of his first paper Royal Society-published paper. [“The pigments of the pieridae: a contribution to the study of excretory substances which function in ornament” Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. Lond. B vol.186 (1895) pp.661-682]. The colour of Hopkins’ jacket may be an in-joke therefore: his paper discussed the yellow of the English Brimstone butterfly.
To the sitter’s left is a Soxhlet extraction apparatus on an electrically heated water bath. The violet ‘ring’ which is visible half-way down the liquid in the test-tube resting in a beaker shown in the foreground illustrates the Hopkins-Cole reaction for tryptophan. The violet colour is due to the presence of protein, as demonstrated by Hopkins and his collaborator Sydney William Cole (1877 — 1951). They showed that when strong sulphuric acid is added to a solution of protein dissolved in glacial acetic acid, the purple colour produced at the interface between the two solutions was due to a reaction of glyoxylic acid, an ‘impurity’ contained in the acetic acid, with tryptophan, an amino acid constituent found in most proteins.
Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1905, he served as its President from 1930 to 1935.
To the sitter’s left is a Soxhlet extraction apparatus on an electrically heated water bath. The violet ‘ring’ which is visible half-way down the liquid in the test-tube resting in a beaker shown in the foreground illustrates the Hopkins-Cole reaction for tryptophan. The violet colour is due to the presence of protein, as demonstrated by Hopkins and his collaborator Sydney William Cole (1877 — 1951). They showed that when strong sulphuric acid is added to a solution of protein dissolved in glacial acetic acid, the purple colour produced at the interface between the two solutions was due to a reaction of glyoxylic acid, an ‘impurity’ contained in the acetic acid, with tryptophan, an amino acid constituent found in most proteins.
Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1905, he served as its President from 1930 to 1935.
Transcription
MF 1938
Object history
Presented to the Royal Society by subscribers, 1938.
The Society’s accounts for the period 1937-1938 (published in the Yearbook) indicate that a fee of £380 0s 0d was paid to the artist from the Hopkins Portrait Fund. [Year Book of the Royal Society. 1939 (Royal Society, London, 1939) p.254].
The Society’s accounts for the period 1937-1938 (published in the Yearbook) indicate that a fee of £380 0s 0d was paid to the artist from the Hopkins Portrait Fund. [Year Book of the Royal Society. 1939 (Royal Society, London, 1939) p.254].
Associated place