Medical Attendance

Medical Attendance, in the Wellcome Collection, encompasses Steen's broader treatment of the domestic sickroom and its attendant cast of medical and family figures. Beyond the specific pulse-taking or prescription-writing moments he depicted elsewhere, medical attendance as a general subject encompassed the full domestic drama of illness: the concerned family, the attending physician, the servants maintaining the sickroom, the patient in various states of distress or resignation. Steen's treatments of illness were rarely straightforwardly sympathetic — his comic vision was too pervasive for that — but they could achieve a range of emotional registers from pure satire to genuine human warmth. The Wellcome Collection's acquisition of this and related works built one of the most significant single-institution holdings of Steen's medical subjects.

The medical attendance composition placed multiple figures in a domestic interior arranged around the patient as its central concern. Interior lighting from a window or lamp created the warm, enclosed atmosphere of a sickroom. Steen's figure groupings were carefully staged to convey the social dynamics of professional, family, and servant attending the ill person.