Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

A very early Picasso painting

Pablo Picasso was sixteen years old and obviously was not yet famous when he made this painting. His father, an artist himself, had encouraged his son to paint but favored traditional forms such as country scenes and conventional portraits. He himself sat as model for Science and Charity (1897) and is depicted as the conventional country doctor, sitting by the bedside of this sick woman and counting the patient’s pulse. For this painting the baby was borrowed from a beggar woman and the nun’s habit had also to be borrowed.

Science and Charity. Pablo Picasso. 1897. Museu Picasso de Barcelona Web, http://www.museupicasso.bcn.cat.

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