A physician telling a patient that he is going to die: the patient stares out at the viewer. Colour photogravure after the Hon. J. Collier, 1908.

"The model who sat for the artist for the position of the young man given the sentence of death was a member of our family, Gerald Layton Orr, a friend of the artist himself" (letter to the Wellcome Institute from Dr Andrew W. Orr, Montrose, 30 December 1983)

Reviewers at the time the picture was first shown in public (1908) speculated about the nature of the terminal disease the patient might have contracted. Syphilis was one suggestion

The microscope on the physician's desk resembles the compound monocular microscope manufactured in England by Henry Crouch in the 1890s, as illustrated in J.M. Blumberg et al., The Billings microscope collection of the Medical Museum, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington 1967, p. 107 (information supplied by Mr David Houle, 2005)

London : Geo. Pulman & Sons, Ltd., [1908]

1 print : photogravure, printed in colour ; image 19.9 x 25.1 cm

Select images of this work were taken by the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum: WT/D/1/20/1/98/94

Sentence of death. Hon. John Collier. No. 177. Royal Academy and Paris salon. (Copyright.)

Lisa Tickner, Modern life & modern subjects, New Haven & London, 2000, p. 31, plate 22

Pamela M. Fletcher, 'Modern masculinity: The sentence of death', in her Narrating modernity: the British problem picture, Aldershot 2003

Alan Emery and Marcia Emery, Medicine and art, London 2003, pp. 76-77

Wellcome Collection 21878i

The original painting, shown at the Royal Academy in 1908, subsequently passed to the Wolverhampton Art Gallery, reserve collection