Images of Nursing Essay

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Images of Nursing

1897 Pablo Picasso

1856 Jerry Barrett

As we have noted, there are numerous images that are effective in establishing the image and role of nursing to the general public. Two prime examples are a surprisingly poetic "Science and Charity," an 1897 work by 17-year-old Pablo Picasso, and a work from 1856, "Florence Nightingale Receiving the Wounded at Scutari -- or The Mission of Mercy," by Jerry Barrett.

"Science and Charity" is oil on canvass and was one of the very few "realistic" paintings done by Pablo Picasso. This academic painting shows a woman on her deathbed, a doctor on her right and a nun on her left. The doctor looks away from the patient as he takes her pulse and goes about his science. The religious sister holds the woman's soon-to-be-orphaned child, offering a glass toward the woman. Both the nun and the doctor wear the same colors of black and white, and appear as two sides of a scale.

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But the balance is tipped slightly toward the sister as the light shines on her while the doctor is cast in shadow. At the moment of death his science is useless, but the charitable care of the sister seems to offer comfort. It is clear that the image of care is not focused upon the doctor, but rather on the active role the nurse/nun is playing not only with the child, but also with the offer of a drink (tea, medicine, water?).

"Florence Nightingale," also an oil on canvass was almost never completed. Jerry Barrett, a famous portrait painter of the time, traveled from England to Scutari (in modern Turkey) after so much of Nightingale's work was exposed in the newspapers. Again, this is a case in which art mimics life -- Nightingale was too focused on her duties as a nurse to worry about posing for a painting. And, in the painting, her calm….....

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