femme-de-lettres: Large (Wikimedia) This pastel drawing is…
This pastel drawing is Henry Tonks’ Saline Infusion—An Incident in the British Red Cross Hospital, Arc-en-Barrois, 1915.
As the Imperial War Museum writes, “During the war [Tonks] served as a RAMC doctor and worked with Sir Harold Gillies, one of the pioneers of plastic surgery. Tonks drew studies of facial injuries before and after surgery, requiring accuracy, attention to detail and emotional understanding.”
Here the blues, tans, and whites of his reduced palette imply a cleanliness, while the postures of the simplified, block-y figures convey sympathy and—in the case of the patient—pain.
There is something simultaneously gut-wrenching and surprisingly dispassionate to the work: vivid and painful, yes, but somehow a little bit distant.
Perhaps that’s to be expected from a man whose job it was to record war injuries in just such a manner as he records this surgery.
Henry Tonks was friends with John Singer Sargent. The two travelled together to France for the trip Sargent did in 1918 in support of the war effort.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1wQQEEv.
