The Gentleman Artist-Surgeon in Late Victorian Group Portraiture

In this article I consider the ways in which group portraits of surgeons, a genre associated with inscriptions of corporate membership and institutional authority, reflected the complex and at times contradictory status of surgeons during the late Victorian period. Group portraits from this period offer a diverse range of representations of surgeons – from middle-class professional to hygiene reformer, scientist to cultured gentleman – all of which worked against the popular conception of the surgeon as manual labourer and bloody carpenter. In particular, the emergence during the period of the gentleman artist-surgeon, exemplified by the celebrity surgeon and amateur artist Henry Thompson (1820–1904), signalled a new incarnation of the surgeon and offered an alternative to both the stereotypes of the surgeon as manual labourer and the surgeon or middle-class professional. But there were complexities and contradictions that beset the identity of the gentleman artist-surgeon, and these will be considered with reference to Thompson’s own novel, Charley Kingston’s Aunt (1885).