The COVID-19 pandemic reminds us in many ways of the Spanish Flu outbreak that affected the whole world for more than 2 years. With more than 500 million people infected (1/3 of the world’s population at the time) and more than 100 million deaths, this epidemic killed more people between 1918 and 1920 than the combined total of military and civilians deaths during the First World War.
Artists of the time depicted war scenes more often than creating work which took the Spanish Flu as its subject. There are relatively few pictorial representation of this catastrophe. The best known artists from this period are the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch and the American-Italian painter, John Singer Sargent. Munch, renowned for his work “The Scream”, one of the most famous paintings in the history of art, caught Spanish Flu and recovered from it in 1919. He made his suffering the subject of two self-portraits: the first painted when he was ill and the second while he was recovering.