Gift from Mongkut, King of Siam
Title/Subject: Southern European landscape
Artist: unknown (Thai)
Date: ca. 1851-68
Type: painting
Medium: oil on wood panel
Dimensions: 8 1/2" h x 12" w
Collection: Dan Beach Bradley Papers (RG 30/5)
Dan Beach Bradley (1804-73) was a printer, linguist, and the first western physician to enter Thailand as a missionary. The painting of a southern European landscape by an unknown Thai artist was a gift to Bradley from Mongkut, King of Siam (reigned 1851-68). Bradley combined mission work with the practice of modern medicine, introducing inoculation, vaccination, drugs to relieve pain, and modern obstetrics among the Thais. It is said that he won more converts through his battles against smallpox than through his preaching. His reputation as a healer spread, and he became the physician and tutor to Mongkut, an intellectually curious Buddhist eager for Western educational and scientific improvements in his country. The subject and style of the painting suggests that Mongkut's gift was an expression of gratitude, as well as a demonstration of his modernity in the Western cultural sense.
Bradley's literary activities included translations of Scripture into Siamese, the publication of a Siamese Dictionary, and the founding in 1844 of the first newspaper published in Thailand, the Bangkok Recorder. Bradley is credited with inventing and casting the Siamese types for printing and for introducing the printing press, bookbinding, and lithography into Thailand.
Dan Beach Bradley's connection to Oberlin College was through his wife Sarah Blachly (A.B. 1845) and their children, four of whom graduated from Oberlin. Sarah sailed with Bradley to Thailand in 1849. Mrs. Bradley continued missionary work among the Thais, printing tracts, and teaching English to the women of the royal household. Sarah Bradley died in 1893, twenty years after the death of her husband, never once having left Thailand.
Source
Dan Beach Bradley Papers (RG 30/5).
Related Collections
Dan Freeman Bradley Papers (RG 30/125)
Notebooks of Arthur E. Bradley (RG 21)