Episodes in the history of cinchona 2: the countess of Chinchón takes cinchona. Oil painting.

Reference:
47364i
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Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

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Credit

Episodes in the history of cinchona 2: the countess of Chinchón takes cinchona. Oil painting. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). Source: Wellcome Collection.

About this work

Description

The painting illustrates the story (probably apocryphal in some respects) that the Viceroy of Peru, who arrived there on 19 April 1629, Don Luis Jeronimo de Cabrera y Bobadilla, Count of Chinchón, was persuaded to give to his wife, Doña Francisca Henriquez Ribera, Countess of Chinchón, a native remedy (bark of the tree subseqently called cinchona) to cure her intermittent fever. On the left is a native Peruvian bringing supplies of the bark from the jungle, in the centre is the count, and on the right is the countess

Physical description

1 painting : oil on canvas ; canvas approximately 170 x 200 cm

Related material

Select images of this work were taken by the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum: WT/D/1/20/1/13/65
Select images of this work were taken by the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum: WT/D/1/20/1/33/98

Lettering

Ægrotat Limæ coniu(n)x chinconia febrim cortice mirando pocula tincta fugant. The Latin inscription means "At Lima, Chinchón's wife lies sick, the cup wet with the marvellous bark routs the fever"

Reference

Wellcome Collection 47364i

Reproduction note

A trompe l'oeil copy, painted in oil on canvas, commissioned by (or possibly presented to) Henry S. Wellcome around 1930, of a fresco in the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia, Rome, possibly of c. 1850

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