ARTIST'S SON VISITS MURAL ON DISPLAY IN MUSEUM
  

Artist's son visits mural on display in museum.

From time to time the museum receives an inquiry from someone wondering if one of the nearly 25 million items in the collections of the museum is an artifact or specimen connected to a deceased member of their family. Often, curators, using the museum’s computerized data base, are pleased to confirm that an ancestor’s bone or photograph is actually one of the nation’s treasures.

But when Brian A. McMillen, Ph.D., contacted the museum to ask if anyone knew what became of a mural painted by his father, he received a much bigger surprise than he imagined.

“Oh my gosh,” McMillen said when he recently visited the museum for the first time, with his wife and mother-in-law along for the adventure. “All I ever had seen was a little black and white photo. It’s huge.”

The mural, entitled “Psychiatric Patients at Forest Glen,” is a whopping 7.1 feet by 10.6 feet and is on permanent display alongside a collection of artifacts related to yellow fever investigator Maj. Walter Reed, the museum’s fifth curator and namesake of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where the museum is located.

McMillen’s father, Jack, was an artist who studied at the Minneapolis School of Art and worked in the New Deal/Works Project Administration Art Project, created to help provide economic relief during the Depression. After the country entered World War II McMillen was drafted at the age of 32 into the U.S. Army. About halfway through basic training he was put in charge of a traveling art show being used to promote the sale of War Bonds across the country. He then finished basic and was assigned to the engineers. He started to mysteriously lose weight, and in 1944, after undergoing extensive tests at Walter Reed General Hospital, it was determined that he had a tumor obstructing his esophagus.

“My father told me that he was alert and conscious while three Army doctors discussed his condition, and clearly heard them all say that they had never performed this kind of surgery before,” McMillen said. “Fortunately, the tumor was successfully removed and turned out to be benign.”

It was while he was recuperating at the Forest Glen Annex of Walter Reed General Hospital, a former girls school purchased by the Army for treating patients with psychiatric conditions, that McMillen’s father painted the mural. His son believes it was both therapeutic and a way of giving something back to the people who helped him.

From what he knows about the way his father worked, he said he probably started with a photo, then made a charcoal and pencil sketch, then a pastel sketch to get a feel for the colors, and finally made the painting with tempra in egg white, which he preferred to oils, and although he usually would paint directly on walls or on masonite board, this painting is on canvass. The painting hung at Forest Glen until 1994, when it was transferred to the museum. It was restored at the request of the Textbook of Military Medicine Project of the Office of the U.S. Army Surgeon General, as the frontispiece of “Military Psychiatry: Preparing in Peace for War,” and appears on page VI of that volume.

“It’s certainly in his style of semi abstractionism. Notice how the buildings and trees frame the men and women in the courtyard and moves your attention to them. He often would paint a "frame within the frame," which was taught to him by his mentor at the Art Students' League of NY.,” McMillen said, noting that a mural painted by McMillen’s father for the U.S. Post Office is still on the wall in College Park, Ga.

A painting his father submitted for a competition to paint a mural in Tuscumbia, Ala. is now in storage at The Smithsonian, and McMillen said he believes the mural on display in the National Museum of Health and Medicine’s “Human Body: Human Being” exhibit is the only one on display in a museum.

According to the label on display next to the mural, “the picture accurately depicts the eclectic architecture while showing maroon-suited patients enjoying the grounds.”

After recuperating from his illness, McMillen’s father completed his training with an engineering unit. The war ended, however, and he was discharged. He lived in New York City as a commercial artist from 1949 until a few years after he retired in 1978. He died in 1999 at the age of 88.

“After he retired from commercial art, I kept kicking him to start painting again and he did, but used the newer acrylic oils. He said he was "too old to crack eggs anymore." I am surprised by the survival of these murals, because he did them right on the wall more as a fresco in technique.”

McMillen visited the museum as a side trip during his attendance at the 35th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, where he also presented two abstracts: “Effect of Oral Consumption of Perchlorate, Alone or in Combination with Ethanol, on Plasma Thyroid Hormone and Brain Catecholamine Concentrations in the Rat” and “Effects of 5-Ht3 Receptor Antagonists, Zacopride and Mdl 72222, on the Volitional Consumption of Ethanol by the Genetic Drinking Rat.” McMillen is a professor of pharmacology and toxicology for the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C.

“I may not be able to draw, but I've got something in my genes that makes me always attempt to escape these science meetings to hit a museum.,” he said, adding, “I always enjoy museums in general anyways, but this was special.”