Doctor Jean-François Caplin
(1794 - ?)
18 April 1865

 

Volume 12, page 273, sitting number 16,241.

[The sitter had previously sat for Silvy on 30 August 1861.]

Doctor Jean-François Isidore Caplin was the author of The Electro-Chemical Bath, for the Extraction of Mercury, Lead, and other Metallic, Poisonous and Extraneous Substances from the Human Body, first published in 1856. Wilkie Collins owned a copy signed by the author. He even took a course of Caplan's 'electric baths' himself, writing to a friend that 'The result is great cheerfulness and great disinclination to pay inland revenue.'

Despite his medical title, sources describe him variously as 'a Milliner and Corset Maker' and 'a Professor of Drawing, Perspective, &c.'

His wife, Roxey Ann Caplin, was a corset maker and inventor. From 1839 she operated commercial premises at 53 Berners Street, just north of Oxford Street. At the Great Exhibition in 1851 she was awarded the prize medal of 'Manufacturer, Designer and Inventor' for her corsetry designs. By 1864 she had filed twenty-four different patents.

Doctor Caplin appears on the 1861 census, living at 9 York Place in Marylebone. At the time of the census he was 67 years old. He gave Paris as his place of birth and for profession he wrote 'Physician.' Also present on the night of the census were his son Francis, aged 15, and four servants.

[The strange device seen on the table next to Dr Caplin looks like something he might have brought to the studio himself but it was in fact nothing to do with him. It first appears in the Silvy daybooks the day before when it was used in a portrait of a young boy named P. A. Fletcher, son of Philip H. Fletcher, and it appears again two weeks later in a portrait taken on 2 May 1865 and also in another on 24 May 1865.]