Ritratto di Louis Pasteur

The year is 1885, and Pasteur is on the edge of something. That July he would give the first rabies vaccine to a human being, a nine-year-old boy bitten by a rabid dog, gambling everything on a treatment he had only tried on animals. Edelfelt, a Finnish painter and friend, shows him not in a study but standing in his laboratory on the rue d'Ulm in Paris, among the flasks and glassware of his work. In his hand is a jar holding the dried spinal cord of a rabbit infected with rabies, the very material he used to build the vaccine. Pasteur suggested that detail himself. Portraits of famous men almost never showed them at the workbench like this, and when it reached the Salon the picture made Edelfelt's name.