William Rimmer: Studies in Medicine

"The Crucifixion" by William Rimmer

"In 1840 William Rimmer married Miss Mary H.C. Peabody, a Quakeress, and soon after started on a tour of portrait-painting through the towns of Randolph, Norfolk County, and Brockton in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. His success was, on the whole, pretty satisfactory, although at the time of his marriage he was seriously considering the plan of studying medicine as a more certain means of support. 

When he decided to become a physician, he found in a doctor friend's library the medical works that he wished to study, and in the doctor a good advisor and teacher. He heard him recite twice a week, giving him at all times every assistance that lay in his power. Rimmer had already much knowledge of some branches of the subject, especially of anatomy. "He impressed me more than any person I ever knew as an original mind. Our conversations concerned the powers of observation, perception, the internal recognition of things," reminisced Dr. Kingman. Rimmer also had another doctor friend who introduced him to the dissecting room.

Every moment the doctor could get during his ten-years' residence, aside from the time given to his shoemaking and studies, he spent in painting portraits, ideal compositions, and miniatures. Neither did he wholly relinquish sculpture: for he cut a small portrait bust of his oldest daughter, then three years old, in marble. He also painted a large altar-piece for the local Catholic priest, including the crucifixion which had been painted without a model. Although he believed in using models and in studying life to gain knowledge and a great power of expression, in the execution of a work he rarely consulted them and depended entirely upon his memory and imagination.

Rimmer worked at his various occupations with such intense zeal that more than once he fell from his cobbler's bench from sheer exhaustion, but earned enough to buy a small home, and had a family of boys and girls growing up about him."

(Excerpts from "The Art Life of William Rimmer: Sculptor, Painter, and Physician" by Truman Howe Bartlett.)