This spare image is fascinating, appearing when an influenza epidemic had prevailed for more than two months in the city of Amsterdam, at a dramatic cost of nearly one in thirty residents every week. The artist, his own medicaments at hand, seems to be contemplating, not so much his own clinical predicament, but how to represent the crisis in visual terms. The self-portrait might represent his interim solution to a dilemma he is not sure how to address satirically. (The irregular Bijvoegsel supplement was most often humorous in content.)
(De Amsterdammer, Amsterdam, 1890)
Sic Transit Pestilentia 