Samuel 1783-1852 Prout

PROUT, SAMUEL (1783-1852), English water-colour painter, was born at Plymouth on Sept. 17, 1783. He spent whole summer days, in company with the ill-fated Haydon, in drawing the quiet cottages, rustic bridges and romantic water-mills of Devon. It was not however, until about 1818, when he visited the Continent and first saw the quaint streets and market-places of continental cities, that Prout discovered his proper sphere. All his faculties sprang into unwonted activity. His eye readily caught the picturesque features of the architecture, and his hand recorded them in drawings which were admirable in line, composition and colour. At the time of his death, on Feb. to, 1852, there was scarcely a nook in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands which his quiet, benevolent, observant eye had not searched for antique gables and sculptured pieces of stone. In Venice especially there was hardly a pillar which his eye had not lovingly studied and his pencil had not dexterously copied.

See a memoir of Prout, by John Ruskin, in Art Journal for 1849, and the same author's Notes on the Fine Art Society's Loan Collection of Drawings by Samuel Prout and William Hunt ; see also the "Winter Number" of the Studio (I914-15), for reproductions of his sketches.

PROUT, WILLIAM (1785-185o),

English chemist and physician, was born at Horton, Gloucestershire, on Jan. 15, 1785, and died in London on April 9, 185o. His life was spent as a practising physician in London, but he also occupied himself with chemical research. He was an active worker in physiological chemistry, and found in 1803 that the acid contents of the stomach contain hydrochloric acid which is separable by distillation. In 1815 he published anonymously in the Annals of Philosophy a paper in which he calculated that the atomic weights of a number of the elements are multiples of that of hydrogen ; and in a second paper published in the same periodical the following year he sug gested that the rpc)rn i'An of the ancients is realized in hydro gen, from which the other elements are formed by some process of condensation or grouping. This view, generally known as "Prout's hypothesis," at least had the merit of stimulating inquiry, and many of the careful determinations of atomic weights undertaken since its promulgation have been provoked by the desire to test its validity. It is also particularly interesting in view of recent de velopments in the study of atomic structure (see Mom).