Calm down, Mrs Smith, no one is watching you
What the news reports I’ve seen about this painting don’t tell you is exactly who came up up with the notion that it might in some way relax hospital patients.
I’m not sure that even a pleasant portrait of the current Queen Elizabeth giving her best beatific beam could be considered “relaxing”, but how anyone might conceive that this Halloween cartoon of someone who looks a lot like the bloody Elizabeth Who Came First would calm heart patients is beyond reason.
But yes, the 1993 five-picture series “The Queens” by Shirley A Brown 1993 that was borrowed by the Ottawa Heart Institute “as part of a study” had to be removed after doctors complained that the portraits boosted their patients’ blood pressure and made them, er, impatient. See the rest.
