A painting by an overlooked Abstract Expressionist has found an unlikely second life on prime-time television. The Earth Bears Witness, a black-and-white abstract work painted by Anna Walinska in 1956, plays a key role in the second season of Best Medicine, the Fox series that began last month, hanging in the office of its lead character, Martin Best, a hotshot surgeon played by Josh Charles.

It is a second chance for the canvas. A few years ago the same painting was due to appear in White House Plumbers, the HBO miniseries about the Watergate scandal, only to be edited out of the final version. This time it has survived the cut and holds a prominent place in the show's central set.

Walinska, who lived from 1906 to 1997, was a Modernist painter whose work has long been under-recognised. In the real world beyond the television set, The Earth Bears Witness entered the permanent collection of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock in 2024, along with additional works by the artist.

The cameo is a small but telling example of how screen placements can revive interest in artists who fell out of the standard histories. A painting once cut from one series now anchors the office of another show's leading man, and a museum in Arkansas holds the original.