Paul Marie Louis Pierre Richer was born on February 17, 1849, to a family of linen
and fabric merchants in Chartres – a region in Centre-Val de Loire, south-west of
Paris. When he was young, every day on his way to school, Paul would go past the famous
cathedral embellished with countless figures, which stimulated his imagination. Watching
the stonemasons repairing the structure, as he passed by, certainly contributed to
Richer’s fondness for sculpture[1].
The young medical student lacked any formal artistic training, but came to Jean-Martin
Charcot’s attention in 1874, when Charcot chaired the committee for Henri Meillet’s
thesis, entitled Permanent Deformations of the Hand from the Point of View of Medical Semiotics, and was captivated by the beauty of Paul Richer’s drawings. The master immediately
proposed that Paul join him at La Salpêtrière to finish his house officership[1]. In the next year, Marc Sée published Research on the Anatomy and Physiology of the Heart, a 90-page book illustrated with 26 beautiful drawings by Richer, showing the heart
from various angles[2]. It is worth mentioning that Richer was profoundly disappointed to find out that
his name appeared nowhere.
Encouraged by Bourneville and under Jean-Martin Charcot’s direction, Richer began
working on his thesis, which was defended in 1879, and served as the basis for the
book entitled Clinical Studies on Hysteric-Epilepsy or Great Hysteria
[3], with 105 figures and nine engravings ([Figure 1]). Richer used his drawings of Mlle. Blanche (Marie) Wittman to illustrate the great
hysterical crises in different periods[4].
Figure 1 Paul Richer’s drawings. Top: Passionate attitude period – sad phase (left). Epileptiform
period – phase of tonic immobility or tetanism (right). Bottom: Contortion phase l’arc de cercle (left). Prodrome - agitation and partial contractures (middle). Period of Clownism
- phase of great movements (right)1,3,11.
Charcot claimed that Richer’s drawings were accurate enough for a doctor to diagnose
the illnesses depicted. That was the motivation for appointing him, in 1882, as head
of the Musée Charcot at the Hçpital de la Salpêtrière
[5]. Both Charcot and Richer published a series of scientific reviews on artworks that
appeared in the Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, a journal published from 1888 to 1918, and coedited by Richer himself[1].
Paul Richer was color blind, which explains why his work is solely composed of sketches
and drawings and, later, engravings and sculptures, but never paintings.
In the famous painting by Pierre Andre Brouillet, A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière (1887)[6], one may recognize many of his assistants surrounding Charcot, who have left their
names in the history of neurology, like Babinski, Gilles de la Tourette, Pierre Marie,
and others. Paul Richer was the only person represented twice: sitting next to Charcot
and on a canvas on the background, where he depicted a hysterical crisis in l’arc de cercle ([Figure 2]).
Figure 2
Université Paris Descartes, Musée d’histoire de la médecine, Paris (author’s photograph).
Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière by Andre Brouillet (1887). Screen of a woman in l’arc de cercle posture (short arrow). Paul Richer (long arrow).
Richer was a member of the Academy of Medicine from 1898, and in 1903 assumed a chair
in artistic anatomy at l’Ecole des Beaux Arts. He mastered anatomy, physiology, drawing and modeling with equal skills, and created
monuments glorifying French medicine, such as his tributes to Alfred Vulpian ([Figure 3]).
Figure 3 Paris (author’s photograph).Alfred Vulpian’s sculpture at the end of Rue Antoine
Dubois, a short distance from the Faculty of Medicine.
In a studio attached to La Salpêtrière, Richer produced his drawings and began to create a collection of statues destined
for teaching neurology. Three of these sculptures became very famous. According to
Henry Meige[7], these patient portraits were thought to be perfectly objective, ‘like a photograph
in three dimensions’.
In 1893, Richer portrayed a bust of a 26-year-old man called Henri ‘Bonn’. The bust
of a Young Man Suffering from Myopathy illustrates a study of sufferers from amyotrophy, in which muscles waste away because
the nerves supplying them are diseased ([Figure 4A])[5].
Figure 4 From: Nouv. Iconogr. de la Salpêtrière. Phototype Nég. A. Londe. (Accessed 2016 Nov).Sculptures
by Paul Richer: Bust of a Young Man Suffering from Myopathy (A). The Woman Suffering
from Labio-Glosso-Laryngeal Paralysis (B). Attitude and Faces in Parkinson’s Disease
(C).
The Woman Suffering from Labio-Glosso-Laryngeal Paralysis (circa 1894), a life-size half-body plaster sculpture evokes extreme pathos ([Figure 4B]). The viewer’s focus is the figure’s finely-modeled face and hand, which reveal
delicately-rendered veins underneath her skin, and her facial expression[5].
Richer’s most well-known pathological sculpture portrays a Woman Suffering from Parkinson’s Disease ([Figure 4C]). A patient called, simply, ‘Gell’ represents the almost-perfect clinical schema
of Parkinson’s Disease. In that 47 cm high sculpture, you can see the typical sufferer
as having an expressionless visage, a head and torso inclined forward, a sunken chest,
and flexed arms and legs: in a word, “the look of an old person who has been welded
together”[5].
In the golden age of Salpêtrière (1862–1893)[6], four people, Paul Richer, Albert Londe (1858–1917), Henry Meige (1866–1940), and
Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), who were all skilled in drawing themselves, had always
been keenly interested in documenting images of diseases as an art form. Londe was
an influential French medical researcher and chronophotographer. In 1878, Jean-Martin
Charcot hired Londe as a medical photographer at La Salpêtrière. In 1882, he devised a system — a 12-lens camera — to photograph the physical and
muscular movements of patients, including individuals diagnosed with hysterical conditions
and epileptic seizures. Meige was a physician, an exceptional anatomist, an excellent
draftsman and a privileged illustrator. In 1924, he succeeded Paul Richer as a professor
of anatomy at l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-Arts de Paris
[7].
Charcot and Richer made the claim that science and art were one and the same: “Science
and art are nothing more than two manifestations of the same phenomenon, two faces
of the same object”[8]. This art affinity resulted in the publication of two books: Les Démoniaques dans l’Art (Paris, 1887)[9] and Les Difformes et les Malades dans l’Art (Paris, 1889)[8], in which they diagnosed illnesses in artworks of the past.
Paul Richer continued engraving, drawing and publishing for the rest of his life,
but he shifted focus in the second half of his career from pathology to health. An
interesting aspect: his book Introduction à L’étude de la Figure Humaine (1902)[10], despite the title, has no drawings whatsoever. Richer moved from the expression
of what was conventionally considered ugly to what was considered beautiful. He exhibited
his sculptures of anonymous athletes — runners, boxers, a shot putter — in the Parisian
salons and even at the Universal Exposition of 1900.
Richer ended his career as the general inspector for drawing instruction. His retirement
did not dampen his productive energy ([Figure 5]). He continued to produce medals and statues. He passed away on December 17, 1933,
at the age of 84 years old.
Figure 5 (Extracted from: http://www.faoablog.com/blog/?p=10900. Accessed 2016 Nov 28).Richer
working on his studio.
