A medical practitioner taking a lady's pulse in a pharmacy. Oil painting by Emili Casals i Camps, ca. 1882.

The painting shows two fashionable ladies visiting a traditional Spanish pharmacy. Clad with much lace and fluffiness, they sit daintily while a courtly physician takes the pulse of one of them. The pharmacist looks on. Like many pharmacies on the continent of Europe, the pharmacy retains its traditional furnishings from at least a century previously, with a wall of polychrome ceramic tiling, some eighteenth-century books, and a wonderful array of ceramic drug-jars. The physician, the pharmacist, and the ladies are portrayed with nostalgia for a vividly imagined, pre-Napoleonic utopia of elegance, leisure and politeness. The picture is the best-known work by the Catalan painter Emili Casals i Camps (1843-1928) who was born in Barcelona and ran an art-academy there. It is a type of picture which was enormously popular in its time, and remained so afterwards: historical figures, though outwardly very much of their own time, are shown to behave in familiar ways which transcend limitations of time and place, "just like us". In this case the implication is that the young women are lovesick and that their malady is not one that can be cured by drugs

Given the title "Malade au coeur" when offered for sale at Christie's London in 1916

[1882?]

1 painting : oil on canvas ; canvas 42.2 x 65.5 cm

Lettering on label attached to front of frame in 1916: Malade au cœur. E. Casals.

Form of painter's name in Catalan from the Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon; it also appears in Spanish form "Emilio Casals y Cams" in some sources (e.g. biographical dictionaries by Thieme-Becker and Bénézit, and in M. Ossorio y Bernard, Galería biografica de artistas españoles del siglo XIX, Madrid: Gaudi, 1975, p. 143).

Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler, Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1907-1950, vol. 6 (1912), p. 102 ("In der Münchener Kunstausstellung 1884 war er mit dem feinmalerischen Kabinettstück "Die Apotheke" vertreten")

Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon, Munich: K.G. Saur, vol. 17, 1997, pp. 54-55 "Als bedeutendstes Werk gilt Farmacia esp. de principios del s. XIX, um 1882/1884"

E. Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, Paris: Gründ, 1999, vol. 3, p. 314 ("Ventes publiques: New York, 1909: Chez l'apothicaire: USD 100")

Wellcome Collection 44588i