The Physicist as Artist: The Landscapes of Pierre Duhem.

Physicists are often accomplished musicians but, surprisingly, excellence in physics is rarely matched with creative ability in the visual arts. One might reasonably expect physicists to draw or paint well because the physicist's ability to see a wealth of ramifications in a single formula is akin to the painter's ability to grasp instantaneously the message of a scene. Someone who had immense ability in both physics and art and was therefore an exceptional to the rule was Pierre Duhem whose stature as a theoretical physicist and as a philosophers and historian of science has not ceased to grow ever since in death in 1916 at the age of fifty-five. The vastness of his publications in those fields is matched by well over four hundred landscapes, the principal part of his artistic output. A substantial number of these is presented in this album by Stanley L. Jaki, who, in his Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem, has already given a glimpse of Duhem the artist. In this special study Professor Jaki draws a detailed parallel between Duhem's ideas on physics and his landscapes. He shows, by citing many passages from Duhem's writings, that the mathematically abstract and the visually concrete can convey a similar message if both stem from a consistent commitment to realism. He also puts Duhem the landscapist in the context of a dignified realism that has never been absents in the long history of landscape painting. Duhem's landscapes reflect strength, balance and dignity although they were inspired by a wide variety of scenes: the rugged coasts of Brittany, the gentle banks of the Meuse, the broad plains around Lille, the prehistoric valleys of the Dordogne and the Brian, the gorges of Tarn and La Jonte, the arid plateaus of the Cevennes, the hills of Provence, the peaks of the Pyrenees and, last but not least, the somber mountains around Cabrespine, a village north-east of Carcassonne where Duhem spent many of his summer vacations. The section on landscapes is preceded by selections from Duhem's childhood drawings, from his aquarelles of mushrooms, and from the illustrations he provided in 1883 for Au pays des gorilles, a politico-cultural satire.

Stanley L. Jaki, a Hungarian-born Catholic priest of the Benedictine Order, is Distinguished Professor at Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. With doctorates in theology and physics, he has for the past thirty years specialized in the history and philosophy of science. The author of twenty-five books and over seventy articles, he has served as Gifford Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and as Fremantle Lecturer at Balliol College, Oxford. Membre correspondant of the Academie des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts of Bordeaux, he is the recipient of the Lecomte de Nouy Prize for 1970 and of the Templeton Prize for 1987.