The art of the invisible

Rich Courtiour is an antiques dealer, specialising in scientific instruments. So far, so relatively normal. But as he opens the door to his suburban bungalow in Longwell Green, it soon becomes clear that he lives a fairly extraordinary life.

Aside from the usual table and chairs and sofa, the living room is full of shelving, stacked with beautiful mahogany slide cases. More sit on the floor, reaching waist height. The dining room table accommodates an incredibly ornate brass microscope. On the walls are various fossils and bones and relics, and on a side table sits a lamp with a shade made from a taxidermy armadillo. “It’s grim, isn’t it!” Rich says cheerfully as he goes to make a round of tea.

A tiny part of Rich’s Victorian slide collection

“This art project has evolved from buying and selling and dealing in scientific instruments, especially microscopes and the specimen slides that come with them,” Rich begins. “The English made the best specimen slides, and were the most prolific makers.

“In their heyday in the mid-19th century, the Victorians were obsessed with this stuff. It was the height of empire and everybody was thirsty for knowledge about the natural world, from the common to the bizarre. And, although it’s niche, there is a market amongst collectors, worldwide.”

Rich hasn’t always done this: his background is in engineering. But, as he puts it, he has “always had an appreciation for really beautiful things”. Currently sitting in his living room, he estimates, are well over 20,000 glass specimen slides – all a standard size of three inches by one inch, as specified by the Royal Microscopical Society of London in 1840.

Just one drawer of slides, ready to be examined under the microscope

It’s an astounding collection. “There’s nothing I can think of in the natural world that I haven’t seen on a microscope slide,” Rich says sincerely, and then begins rifling through some of the countless tiny drawers, pulling them out as he comes across good ones.

“A bit of this drawer is marine biology,” he says, laying it on the table. Around 50 uniform slides sit side by side, ornately decorated in red and gold, with tiny copperplate handwriting describing the specimen inside the glass circle in the centre. There are samples of marine plants, shrimps, seaweeds and insect eggs: a vast array of underwater life, painstakingly collected and displayed.

“The people who made these were incredibly skilled,” Rich comments, and it’s impossible to disagree. “The lithographic labels, the gorgeous handwriting – they are beautifully made. There’s nothing better than pulling out a drawer full and finding them beautifully presented.”

Samples from a drawer marked ‘human’

To demonstrate, he pulls a couple out and we pore over the contents on the dining room table. Incredibly delicate dragonfly wings and shimmering iridescent butterfly parts (“They would have blown the minds of the Victorians!”) hold our attention. There’s even a drawer of human slides, with blackened tissue samples of Colliers’ lung, cross-sections of tiny foetus hands, and a brownish piece of something marked ‘cirrhosis of the liver from a gin drinker’.

Though the slides in themselves are beautifully ornate, it is, of course, the samples that are the real focus. Rich fires up his computer, and switches on the lights around the big grey 1960s Zeiss microscope next to it, which has a modern digital camera rigged above the eyepiece. He fiddles with the microscope, wipes a slide clean and slots it in.

Rich with one of his framed prints, photographed from one of the 20,000 slides in his collection

“As part of the process of buying and selling slides, I photograph them all,” Rich explains. “There’s a bit of a ‘wow-factor’ about looking under a microscope – what you can’t see with the naked eye suddenly becomes visible. The same goes for astronomy at the other end of the scale.

“Although there are thousands of these slides around, not all of them are interesting under the microscope. It’s probably around one in every 300-400 that I think, ‘Oh, that’s nice, I’ll save that’.

“When I first started looking and photographing, my first thought was, ‘That would look beautiful, blown up, printed and put on the wall’. I pushed that idea forward, got some printed and framed and then waited to see whether anyone wanted to buy one.”

A slide showing parts of sea sponge, photographed by Rich Courtiour

Rich focuses the microscope and an image of intricately-arranged shapes appears. They are diatoms, a type of algae, and have been arranged in a perfect pattern, something akin to seeds in a flower head, or an exploding firework. On the slide, the circular formation measures just two millimetres across, but under the microscope it is another world: each individual diatom selected and placed over 150 years ago, and now viewed in perfect clarity.

Though he’s seen it all before, Rich is totally enthralled with each slide he puts under the microscope. Rhinoceros horn becomes rainbow patterned with shapes almost like peacock feathers at 25 times magnification (“I do all the endangered species!” he jokes). Blonde horse hair shines iridescent pink and green as the light hits it from different angles. Crystals of salicine, a painkiller derived from willow bark, burst into kaleidoscopic rings of brightest turquoise and yellow, spinning as Rich turns the slide in search of the perfect composition.

It’s these more abstract forms that Rich is turning into bespoke art. He prints images to order, on high-quality paper (framed or unframed), or on stretched canvas. On the back of each work is a label, showing the original slide and telling the buyer a little about what the image depicts. “People say, ‘Oh, that’s nice, what is it?’ – so now they have that information, and the other part of the story.

“I’m always searching for something quite unusual. There’s just so much content in a small cabinet – vast amounts,” Rich says, putting the slides back and closing the drawers. “It’s like a museum in miniature.”

To find out more about Rich’s unique artwork, and to buy his photographs, visit www.microslideart.com.