Hospital, Middlesex (April 1, 1809) by Auguste Charles Pugin|Thomas Rowlandson|Joseph Constantine Stadler|Rudolph Ackermann, LondonThe Metropolitan Museum of Art
Augustus Pugin
This print by arichitect and artist Augustin Pugin shows a Women's Ward at the Middlesex Hospital in Charles Street - modern day Mortimer Street in London.
The intricate details and soft palette captures a moment of calm serenity in the ward.
The visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to Fort Pitt Military Hospital (1855) by Sir John TennielRoyal Collection Trust, UK
Sir John Tenniel
Perhaps more famous for his children's illustrations, this Tenniel watercolour depicts Queen Victoria visiting the military hospital in Chatham.
Queen Victoria visited 3 March 1885, and later wrote to Lord Panmure, (then Secretary for War) demanding the hospitals be improved: ‘so that the poor men must have their dinners in the same room in which they sleep, and in which some may be dying’.
Sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1964) by Paul SchutzerLIFE Photo Collection
After the hospitalisation of their daughter Sarah in 1944, Barbara Hepworth and her husband, the artist Ben Nicholson, struck up a friendship with Norman Capener, the surgeon who treated Sarah at the Princess Elizabeth Orthopaedic Hospital in Exeter. Through this friendship, Hepworth was invited to witness a variety of surgical procedures.
Over a two-year period, 1947–9, Hepworth produced around 80 works within the series. As well as pencil, ink and chalk drawings, many were executed in both pencil and oil paint on board.
Reconstruction (1947) by Barbara HepworthArts Council Collection
Barbara Hepworth on her Hospital Drawings
"In about the middle of 1947, a suggestion was made to me that I might watch an operation in a hospital.
I expected that I should dislike it; but from the moment when I entered the operating theatre I became completely absorbed by two things: first, the extraordinary beauty of purpose and co-ordination between human beings all dedicated to the saving of life, and the way that unity of idea and purpose dictated a perfection of concentration, movement, and gesture...
... and secondly by the way this special grace (grace of mind and body) induced a spontaneous space composition, an articulated and animated kind of abstract sculpture very close to what I had been seeking in my own work.
For two years I drew, not only in the operating theatres of hospitals, but from groups in my studio and groups observed around me."
