The Spanish Influenza Transformed Everyday Life. But Artists Struggled to Visualize Its Impact

Arthur Comfort’s reproduction of John Maler Collier’s painting The Plague, ca. 1902, published in The Graphic in December 20, 1902.
On October 6, 1918, a newspaper spread appeared in cities across the United States that conflated science, painting, nationalism, and war. The layout mingled scientific diagrams of the human respiratory system with a reproduction of a ca.-1900 painting of a bubonic plague victim by the British artist John Maler Collier, a late follower of the Pre-Raphael