The Medical Portraiture of Lam Qua

A collection of 101 full page color plates



Lam Qua (1801-1860) was an artist from Canton province in Qing Dynasty China, who specialized in western-style portraiture. He developed a following among the foreign community in Canton and Macau and was the first Chinese portrait painter to be exhibited in the West. From 1836 to 1855, Peter Parker, an American medical missionary, and founder of the Ophthalmic Hospital at Canton, commissioned Lam Qua to paint more than 100 pre-operative portraits of patients with large tumors or other major deformities. Parker displayed the paintings in the hospital's waiting room and on trips to the United States to support his missionary activities. The present collection comprises oil paintings held by Yale University's Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library as well as gouache copies held by the Wellcome Library, London.