Doctors and artists, made from the same mould
How odd, I thought, at a gathering of doctors early this week, that they should have about them not the odour of formaldehyde but the air of old and established Royal Academicians, their formality subtly lightened by a hint of flamboyant dash in hair and summer suits. And why not? - for this, the annual art exhibition of the Royal Society of Physicians, was an occasion at least as artistic as its equivalent under the roof of the Old Whore of Piccadilly.
Does some strange sartorial chemistry occur when artists become Royal Academicians and Royal Physicians play at being artists? Do artists then have their hair cut at Trumper's instead of by their wives, do they doff their smocks and go to tailors rather than the peg for clothes? Do doctors, given to formality, dress if not down, then with just a touch of genteel raffishness? Why was it that I, as resolutely casual in clothes as any struggling artist, invited to this doctors' do, had a sober tie in my pocket, just in case?
"Bah!" you may say, "mere amateurs at their therapy." In this you would be both right and wrong. Painting is a therapeutic activity - very good for lunatics and the imprisoned but Prince Charles, for example, is neither of these (though some might argue that he is both) - and it is also a hobby, a means of relaxation and a way of understanding what it is that distinguishes Rembrandt from Raphael. Some of the doctors were as bad as any artists who hang their work on the railings of Green Park - meretricious oily rubbish, sickeningly sentimental children, wishy-washy abstracts and landscapes the victims of aesthetic drift; wooden spoon stuff, all of it - but there was a real weight in the rest, even in those landscapes propped by the Scottish Colourists of a century ago and still lives that pay homage to the inevitable bottles of Giorgio Morandi.
Prizes, however, went to the few sculptors, and in this there is a certain logic. How often we have all lain still to let a doctor's cold fingers probe our bodies to discover what he cannot see: a fractured bone, a ruptured something, a swollen this or that, and "Ah yes," he says - his version of "Eureka!" - in the course of a humiliating digital exploration beyond the clenched sphincter of the anus. If he can know so much of us through feel and touch, we should not be surprised that he can see what lies within the chunk of wood or stone, or can model us in clay and plaster from nothing but the bare abstract bone of a supporting armature. These are doctors whose artistic skills are far beyond the amateur.
Was there, a thousand years ago and more, some sweet reason in the Catholic Church's appointment of the Apostle Luke as the patron saint of, not only artists, but of doctors and surgeons too?
