"The Sick Child," by Joseph Clark

The Sick Child

Joseph Clark (1834-1926)

c. 1858

Etching after one of the artist's own paintngs

H 24.7 cm x W 19.1 cm

Item no. 0100921

Credit: Given by Rosemary Chiles

Downloaded here, with thanks, for non-commercial online use.

This highly detailed and very skilful etching speaks volumes about the artist's dedication to his work. [Commentary continues below]

This is a poor family: the father might be a poacher, if the dead rabbit on the floor beside him is any indication. But there is no mistaking the couple's love and concern for the sick child. There is a bottle of medicine on the end of the mantlepiece, but the father has taken the little girl on his knee from the cushioned chair, and they are coaxing her to take some nourishment — without success, it seems. A smaller child sitting on a striped mat by the chairs is preoccupied with some little object, oblivious to their anxiety. This is domestic realism suffused with feeling, suggesting the closeness of a family in circumstances which have allowed for the purchase of some medicine, but which probably precluded the summoning of a physician. (Barry Milligan contrasts the scene usefully with the more middle-class setting of Clark's other work of this period, The Sick Boy [The Doctor's Visit], in a more middle-class setting, see p. 647). It is by no means superficially sentimental.

Noted at the time was the young artist's skill and humanity. One of Clark's fellow-students at Leigh's was Henry Stacy Marks, who recalls the special evenings allotted for their master's comments before the momentous "sending in" day at the Royal Academy. Marks wrote:

Joseph Clark brought his celebrated picture of “The Sick Child” on one of these evenings. We were all struck with wonder by its technique, its pathos, its human nature. No one suspected that Clark, so quiet and retiring, could produce such a work, for at the sketching meetings, at the end of the two hours, when time was up, he would have little more than a head, or sometimes a figure, slightly but always charmingly indicated. There was the picture in answer to our doubts — but in what a state! covered with hairs from brushes, dust, and other impurities. Leigh, who always inculcated that a clean workmanlike "surface" was one of the essentials of a picture, took a palette knife, daintily detached the excrescences, and washed and oiled the picture, much to the improvement both of surface and appearance. (1: 26)

So perhaps Leigh was instrumental in the painting's selection and consequent success. — Jacqueline Banerjee

Bibliography

Marks, Henry Stacy. Pen and Pencil Sketches. London: Chatto & Windus, 1894. Vol. 1 of 2. Internet Archive. Web. 20 November 2024.

Milligan, Barry. "Luke Fildes's 'The Doctor,' Narrrative Painting, and the Selfless Professional Ideal." Victorian Literature and Culture 44, no. 3 (2016): 641–68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43923402.

The Sick Child. V&A. Web. 20 November 2024.

Created 20 November 2024