Art Talk: Art as Medicine: Lessons from the Gilded Age

Co-presented by NSU Art Museum and NSU Health.

Between the acceptance of germ theory in the 1880s and the antibiotic revolution of the twentieth century, works of art enjoyed a unique moment in which they functioned in medicinal terms for both artists and viewers. This talk considers, for example, how the painter Abbott Thayer addressed his fear of disease by turning his children into the subject of art following the death of his wife from tuberculosis. Works of art also defined the public perception of Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the nineteenth century’s most famous writers and tuberculous patients, who was pictured by John Singer Sargent and Augustus Saint-Gaudens through a romantic lens that treated his illness as a mark of talent. These examples suggest how Gilded Age artists translated disease into another language–a visual language with therapeutic powers.