The Dentist

The Dentist, painted around 1770 near the end of Tiepolo's life in Madrid, belongs to the tradition of itinerant healer genre scenes popular in European art since Caravaggio's followers depicted quacks and tooth-pullers in Dutch and Flemish street scenes. In Spain, Tiepolo encountered a rich culture of popular spectacle — bullfights, religious processions, street entertainment — that may have rekindled his interest in the carnivalesque subjects he had explored in the Pulcinella series four decades earlier. The traveling dentist extracting teeth amid a crowd of grimacing spectators was a stock figure of early modern satire, used by Brueghel, Jan Steen, and others as a metaphor for charlatanism in all its forms. By 1770 Tiepolo was old, embattled by critics who preferred the Neo-classical style championed by Anton Raphael Mengs at the Spanish court, and these late genre pictures may reflect his withdrawal into private pictorial invention. The painting connects his Venetian theatrical interests to the late observations of Spanish popular culture that mark his final years.

Executed with luminous palette and attention to bravura brushwork, the work reveals Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's characteristic approach to composition and surface. The treatment of light and the careful modulation of color create visual richness within a unified pictorial scheme.