Featured Unusual Painting of a Dying Nun, with damage to signature

Or has she just fallen ill....
It's an intriguing little painting that I found at a thrift store some years ago, but to my great dismay, the signature is hard to decypher because some idiot put nails through it to fixate the frame to the painting exactly in the spot where the signature is...Something was written on the back as well, but that has faded unfortunately.
...as it seems to have some age to it, it would be nice to finally put a name to this and to see if getting it restored may be worth it.
I think the last name may be Thomas, but not sure...please do not let the first name be james(the first letter might be a J), because there will be millions of those...

 

I love this image... nice find!
I first read it as J. Bomas or Bomus ... though Ive never encountered that name before.

 

An early Red Cross painting. Never seen anything like before. Wonder if they are others.

Debora

 

Hah! Well, there's this one (of which yours appears to be a copy.) "The Innocent Victim" by Seymour S. Thomas.

https://books.google.com/books?id=5...the innocent victim seymour s. thomas&f=false

Debora

 

Apparently that painting was a great succes at the french salons(Seymour lived in France for a long time) that was reproduced quite a lot, mine is a more post-impressionist french version of it, I guess. It is still nice though.
https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fth12
this is the original although mirrored for some reason...:

 

Reminds me of my favourite great-uncle. He was the youngest Red Cross doctor during WW I.
He was 17 when he graduated from medical university. He couldn't start a practice because no one took him seriously at that age, so he volunteered for Red Cross service in Flanders. There he saw horrendous things at that tender age, and of course many of the boys he treated were the same age, some even younger.
He ultimately became a better doctor than many of his fellow students who had been old enough to start a practice, and became a wonderful man too.

 

It looks like the costumes come from the Franco-Prussian War; with the better rifles later on, those red hats would be like wearing a "shoot me" sign.

 

This painting may have been a tribute to the innocent victims of that war( which was a disaster for France) and the relatively new Red Cross at the time, although painted twenty years later in 1891.