Der Zahnarzt (The Dentist)

This dental scene from around 1644 belongs to Dou's popular series of medical practitioner paintings, a genre that combined entertainment with gentle satire on human credulity. Dentistry in seventeenth-century Holland was practiced by itinerant tooth-pullers who combined their services with fair entertainment, and their depicted activities carried comic associations quite different from the more respectable physician subjects Dou also painted. The comic potential of the suffering patient — grimacing in pain while the practitioner worked — was a traditional subject in Netherlandish art stretching back to the sixteenth century. Dou's fijnschilder refinement elevated this comic subject into a demonstration of technical virtuosity.

The intimate scene is rendered with Dou's characteristic microscopic precision, the dental instruments and expressions captured with the same meticulous attention to detail that made his works among the most prized in Dutch collections.