The Physician's Visit

The Physician's Visit from 1664, now in Museum De Lakenhal, depicts a doctor examining a lovesick patient — one of the most popular subjects in Dutch genre painting and one of Steen's most characteristic themes. The diagnosis of love-sickness was a comic convention rooted in the humoral theory of medicine, which held that unrequited love could produce genuine physical symptoms: pallor, weakness, loss of appetite, and melancholy. The pompous physician who gravely examines the pulse or urine of a young woman who is actually sick with longing provided an opportunity for gentle satire of both medical pretension and the follies of love. Steen painted the doctor-visit subject in several versions, each exploring different aspects of the triad between the physician, the patient, and the bystanders who know the true cause of the illness. His treatment combines sympathy for the afflicted young woman with mockery of the physician's diagnostic self-importance — and implicitly of the social conventions that made it impossible to admit the real nature of the ailment. De Lakenhal's 1664 version is among the finest of the series, showing Steen's theatrical staging and sharp characterization at their most accomplished.

The medical scene demonstrates Steen's theatrical staging, with the pompous physician, the wilting patient, and knowing bystanders arranged in a composition that reads like a comic play.