Visiting Day at the Hospital

Visiting day on a children's ward. A man in a dark work jacket sits on a rush-seated chair beside a bed, his cap in his hand, and watches the pale boy lying in it with half-closed eyes. In the next bed a woman leans in to hug another child, and further back more visitors have gathered by the tall window. On the bedside table in front sits a peeled orange. Geoffroy, who signed his pictures Géo, painted the scene in 1889, and the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts bought it at that year's Salon for the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. Its later life was quieter. From 1926 the canvas hung on loan in the town hall of Vichy, a spa town in central France, and it only returned to Paris in 2011, when it joined the Musée d'Orsay.