Find thousands of books, manuscripts, visual materials and unpublished archives from our collections, many of them with free online access.
Search for free, downloadable images taken from our library and museum collections, including paintings, illustrations, photos and more.
Oil painting of a man smoking an opium pipe, Europe
- Science Museum, London
- Digital Images
- Online
Available online
Licence
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
You can use this work for any purpose, including commercial uses, without restriction under copyright law. You should also provide attribution to the original work, source and licence.
Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) terms and conditions https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Credit: Oil painting of a man smoking an opium pipe, Europe. Science Museum, London. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Selected images from this work
About this work
Description
This painting of a man smoking an opium pipe used to hang in the opium den run by Ah Sing (d. 1890), in New Court, Victoria Street, London. Opium, a highly addictive drug made from the poppy plant, was used medicinally as a pain killer and to cause sleep but was also smoked socially for its hallucinating and euphoric effects.
Ah Sing’s opium den was the model for the one described in Charles Dickens’ unfinished final story 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood'. It was probably the most famous of the dens in Victorian London and Dickens was just one of a number of well known individuals who visited it – presumably for research purposes.
maker: Unknown maker
Place made: Europe