Nadežda Petrović in the Prizren and Valjevo war military hospital: Searching for the time and place of origin of two museum objects

Abstract

One of the symbols of the suffering of Valjevo and Serbia in the great typhus epidemic from the first half of 1915 is the famous Serbian painter Nadežda Petrović. As a volunteer nurse, looking after the sick, she herself succumbed to this dangerous disease. In addition to various historical texts, two visual documents are related to Nadežda's stay in Valjevo: a photograph, in which Nadežda, with a group of doctors, stands in front of the hospital building, and an art painting that Nadežda painted, but did not write the name or year of origin. It was considered to be her last work of art and that is why it was later, after the place and year of the painter's death, named Valjevo Hospital in 1915. New historical sources and additional analyses have indicated that the mentioned photograph was certainly not taken in Valjevo in 1915, during the First World War, but during the First Balkan War, in Prizren in 1913. This knowledge opened the possibility that the famous art painting was not painted in Valjevo, but in Prizren. Among other facts, this possibility is indicated by the fact that the hospital where Nadežda worked and died in 1915 was located in the barracks, and the picture shows hospital tents, as Nadežda mentioned in one of her letters written in Prizren in 1913.