In 1858, Florence Nightingale; nurse, medical reformer and statistician, published her Rose Diagram, a before and after chart, which demonstrated that preventable infectious disease caused more deaths in the Crimean War than battlefield wounds. Rather than present her information as a bar chart, Florence’s diagram graphically depicted, through coloured wedges, her message that battlefield wounds could be successfully treated though nutrition, ventilation, clean linen and hand washing.

What appealed to me, as a painter of abstracts, was the graphic possibilities of the Rose Diagram. These three paintings were created for the 2021 Unity exhibition at Derby Royal Hospital.