The Doctor's Visit after Caspar Netscher

Paintings of the water doctor were popular in the Netherlands in the 18th century.  This picture shows a young woman in a satin and fur edged jacket seated at a table. The doctor is holding her wrist to take her pulse and holding a urine flask in his left hand. These may be allusions to love sickness and or pregnancy, as the woman is holding her other hand to her heart and there is a letter which may be a love letter on the table.

Dr Amos Middleton by an unknown artist

This painting was commissioned by a large number of grateful and admiring friends to commemorate Dr Middleton's retirement in 1844. Dr Amos Middleton (1779-1847) trained as a doctor in Warwick, where he was apprenticed to William Birch. He then practiced at the Warneford Hospital in Oxford before moving to Leamington where he worked for 20 years. This key figure in Leamington's history wrote a very early treatise on the Leamington waters in 1806 and was said to have been the first to make bathing facilities available to the poor.

Dr Henry Jephson by John Bostock

A watercolour portrait of Dr Jephson by John Bostock, showing Jephson sitting at a table with books to his left dated 10th June 1850. This may be the portrait which was painted for the Misses Manners Sutton according to Jephson's obituary in the Warwick Advertiser of 18 May 1878.

Henry Jephson by William Gill

Dr Henry Jephson (1798-1878) was a famous doctor and philanthropist. He moved to Leamington Spa in 1819 to assist Dr Chambers. His patients included Princess Victoria, Florence Nightingale, John Ruskin and George IV. The portrait was commissioned by the residents of Leamington to hang in the Assembly Rooms.

Dr Haddon by William Gill

This painting was a companion piece to the portrait of Henry Jephson and commissioned at the same time.

William Gill was a painter who lived and worked in Leamington and London between 1826 and 1871. Eighteen of his genre paintings and portraits were exhibited at the Royal Academy.

Dr Jephson by Augustin Edouart

Augustin Edouart (1789-1861) was a French artist who lived and worked in England from 1814 onwards. He travelled around Britain, Ireland and America selling his silhouettes of royalty and celebrities and pictures made of human hair to wealthy buyers. The Courier of 12 August 1837 describes one of his visits to Leamington as attracting 'the most eminent public characters and first families... and not a visitor leaves his rooms without having found the facisimile of some acquaintance'. The silhouette of Dr Henry Jephson seated at a desk was painted rather than cut from black paper in 1839.

Dr Frederick Haynes by Annie Edwards

Frederick Haynes is now known for his role as one of the founders of lawn tennis, however, this painting records his work as doctor at the Warneford hospital. This oil painting was probably commissioned by the hospital in the early 1900s. It hung in their board room until the 1990s when it was purchased by the Gallery with the support of the Leamington Medical Society.

Annie Edwards (1872-1967) studied at the Academie Julian in 1906 and Birmingham School of Art. She taught life drawing and painting and painted flowers, rural scenes and portraits which were exhibited at leading British galleries. She lived in Stratford in 1899 and then in Leamington from 1906 to 1920.

Dr Thomas William Thursfield by Annie Edwards

Dr Thursfield was a physician at the Warneford Hospital in Leamington as well as being Dr Jephson's personal doctor. He held public offices in the town for many years including Mayor and JP and helped improve public sanitation and create parks in the town. This painting was commissioned by the Board of Governors of Warneford hospital to present to Dr Thursfield in recognition of his fundraising and advocacy for the hospital. The Leamington Spa Courier said Thursfield was: 'one who has fought a good fight and worked so enthusiastically and energetically for the benefit of his fellow creatures and townsmen as the distinguished senior physician of their hospital.' The painting hung the Boardroom at the hospital until the 1990s.

Annie Edwards (1872-1967) studied at the Academie Julian in 1906 and Birmingham School of Art. She taught life drawing and painting and painted flowers, rural scenes and portraits which were exhibited at leading British galleries. She lived in Stratford in 1899 and then in Leamington from 1906 to 1920.

Restoration of the Royal Pump Rooms by Howard Norman

This watercolour painting of the front of the Royal Pump Rooms was probably painted in the early 1980s and may have been an unrealised architectural scheme for the building.

The Other Patient by Keith Henderson

Keith Henderson (1883-1982) studied art at the Slade School and in Paris. He had an lengthy career as an artist, working an official war artist for the RAF during the Second World War, illustrating books and exhibiting his paintings at leading galleries throughout Britain. This is one of a number of gouache studies of groups of figures in minimal settings painted in the 1970s.

Template for my future plastic surgery by Marc Quinn

Template for my Future Plastic Surgery is a self portrait in which Quinn deals with the idea of physical appearance and the elusive way it relates to feelings inside. This print was generated from a photograph of the artist by Dan Leppard, with photographs of casts of parts of other people’s bodies collaged on top. The collaged items are: the ear of a violinist, the nose of an impresario, the tongue of a noted chef, the hand of Quinn’s then-girlfriend, lying over his heart. The brain is a photograph of a piece of coral which alludes to the interface between humans and nature. Quinn explored this theme in later sculptures such as The Origin of the Species, Rubber Soul, and The Frozen Frog, which the latter made for the exhibition Time Machine shown at the British Museum, London, in 1994.

This print formed part of the London portfolio commissioned by Paragon Press of work by young british artists included Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst.

Lydia Pinkham by Michelle Charles

Charles four photograms depicting lydia pinkham bottles, a quack medicine which was a popular cure all in the 19th century, draw analogies with what some people considered where 'cure all' remedies offered at the Royal Pump Rooms and in advertising spa water.

Michelle Charles lived and taught in New York for main years returning to London in 2002. Her photograms, paintings and drawings focus on every day objects – medicine bottles, soap and cleaning tools and their inherent relationship to hygiene and the human body. She has exhibited at galleries in the USA and Britain and her work is in numerous collections, including the British Museum and the National Museum of Art in Washington, D.C.

Bewegungsbad N135a by Catherine Yass

This is one of a series of images taken by Catherine Yass at the Friedrichsbad baths in the German spa town of Baden Baden (Baden means bath in German).

The titles of the images are taken from the original blueprints of the rooms. This image depicts the entrance to the men’s pool at the baths. This is to the side of the large central circular marble pool. The baths have strict rules: bathers have to be naked, remain silent and take the treatments in a certain order. The full cycle takes about three hours giving Yass plenty of time with her thoughts and to dwell on her Jewish ancestry: '[the baths] were beautiful and sinister at the same time. Engendered in their history is a sense of purity and spirituality but there is an underlying suggestion of order and perfection which pervades the architecture, implicating this idyllic setting in the more sinister aspects of Germany’s recent past.'

In each of the images the baths are strangely quiet. The pools are empty and the water still. This places the series within a group of works in which Yass photographed buildings which are unusually empty of people. This group is juxtaposed by one of portraits.

Replicator by Mark Francis, c1995, Oil on canvas (A950.2000)

Francis's work reflects a growing interest amongst young British artists in scientific debates, particularly concerning the human body. His interest in medicine stems from a fascination with natural history developed in childhood. This was rekindled when he worked for an antiquarian print dealer colouring Victorian medical illustrations. It stimulated an extensive collection of prints and models, surgical dissections and illustrations of diseases of the body. This collection has influenced his work since the mid 1980s.

Replicator is one of a series of large scale paintings created in the mid 1990's based on microbiological photographs of blood, sperm, chromosomes and bacteria. This particular painting is based on microscopic images of chromosomes, the thread like structures in the nucleus which are the body's primary repository of DNA. The title Replicator both describes the role of chromosomes and evokes a depersonalised almost mechanistic approach to the human body taken by medical science. Replicator was painted in the mid 1990s when Francis made a conscious decision to use black, white and grey. To him the process of painting is a crucial part of the outcome because it dictates the type of painting which results. He has to decide on the composition before he begins as once started it cannot be changed. This is because he works wet on wet dragging the paint surface and using different combinations of matt and gloss paint, to give them a certain dynamic and luminous optical effect.

UV Treatment Room, Mishkor Sanatorium by Jason Oddy

Photographer Jason Oddy explores the way that architecture manages and orders our lives. His clinically rendered images of public spaces draw our attention to the conscious and unconscious ideas embedded in them. If his pictures of Nazi holiday resorts and Soviet spas hint at the now defunct dreams of once promised utopias, then his images of the UN's twin headquarters in Geneva and New York anticipate an ideally ordered world, where the ability to control communication in all its forms is paramount.

Corridor, Mishkor Sanatorium by Jason Oddy,2000

A corridor leading to the hydrotherapy room at the Mishkor sanitorium. This corridor is very similar to the marble or medical corridor at the Royal Pump Rooms in that the doors all lead into one large room with divided off treatment areas.