The physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Jerome Friedman has donated two watercolours to the Nobel Prize Museum. The works are painted by Friedman himself and offer a glimpse of a lesser-known side of the laureate – his lifelong interest in painting.

Jerome Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990, together with Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor, for research that contributed to our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of matter, quarks. However, his path to physics was not a straightforward one. Drawing and painting had been important to him since childhood, and in high school he attended an arts programme with the ambition of becoming an artist.

“I won a national prize for a block print that I did, and my ambition was to become an artist. But then, something intervened. At a local museum, I bought a book by Einstein about relativity – I was always curious about the natural world and I was intrigued by what I had  heard about relativity,” Friedman explains, and continues: “I spent a good deal of  time reading this book, but ultimately found that I did not really understand it. But it fascinated me and I wanted to understand the intriguing world of physics. So, upon graduation, I accepted a scholarship to the University of Chicago, turning down a scholarship at the Museum School of the Art Institute of Chicago.”

He later earned his PhD at the University of Chicago. His interest in art, however, has remained with him throughout his life, and he continued to paint alongside his scientific career.

The watercolours now donated to the Nobel Prize Museum are titled Tushar’s Brother and Mountains in the Morning Mist. They were painted around 2020, when Friedman was in his nineties and had not yet lost too much of his vision to continue painting. The watercolours are based on photographic references and reflect Friedman’s interest in natural motifs.