On This Day - 9 January 1682/3

On this day in 1682/3, Alexander Geekie (1655-1727) was admitted to the Freedom of the Company by Redemption, becoming Master in 1719. Surgeon, Fellow of the Royal Society from 1710, member of the Society of Antiquaries, Geekie was born in Baldowrie, Perthshire, later settling and making his career in London.

Geekie assembled a collection of portraits of philosophers and scientists, a number of which were by Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723), leading portraitist of his day. It was Geekie who gave to the Company the portrait of the King’s Architect Inigo Jones after the original by Sir Anthony Van Dyck, which hangs in the Hall to this day. Inigo Jones designed the Company’s Anatomy Theatre of 1638, only the third such purpose-built structure in western Europe, following Padua (1594) and Leiden (1597).

Also a keen amateur artist, Geekie attended Kneller’s Academy of Painting and Drawing (the first academy of painting and drawing from life in Britain), and produced pastel drawings after other artists’ work, as well as original portraits of his family.

One of the pastels produced by Geekie was of John Locke (1632-1704), physician and Enlightenment philosopher, drawn from life in 1696. Locke was both patient and friend, and letters between the two remain amongst three thousand of Locke’s letters in the Bodleian Library, along with Locke’s medical notebooks.

Towards the end of Locke’s life he was in poor health, and Geekie made several attempts to relieve Locke of his ear-pain and deafness, including ‘the application of a large roast onion wrapped in Colewort leaf, and made into a poultice with the addition of herbs‘ followed by the supply of a silver ear trumpet. Geekie acquired a portrait of Locke by Sir Godfrey Kneller, which formerly hung in Houghton Hall Norfolk and is now in the Hermitage, St Petersburg.