Tag Archives: melancholia

Ophthalmology in Regency era China: a portrait of Thomas Richardson Colledge by George Chinnery

May 20, 2020

Stephen Martin Thailand   Fig. 1. Dr. Thomas Richardson Colledge and his assistant Afun in their Ophthalmic Hospital, Macao, 1833. Oil on canvas. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Thomas Richardson Colledge (1797-1879) was an ophthalmic surgeon who practiced in Macao, China, for a quarter of a century in the late Regency era. Colledge’s daughter, Frances […]

Edvard Munch: sickness and death

October 4, 2018

The Sick Child Death in the Sickroom These two paintings by the famous Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) reflect his lifelong melancholia and obsession with sickness and death. This has been attributed to his childhood experiences of his father’s drifting towards insanity, his mother’s death from tuberculosis, and the later death of two siblings from […]

Therapeutic beauty

January 23, 2017

Elizabeth Lee Carlisle, Pennsylvania, United States A longer version of this article was published in American Art, Volume 18, Number 3. © 2004 by The University of Chicago Press.   Abbott Handerson Thayer, Angel, 1887.  Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Gift of John Gellatly In the late 1880s, the painter Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921) […]