Currently not on view
Doctor's Shop,
1631
Pieter Quast, Dutch, 1605/6–1647
y80
More Context
Special Exhibition
A flamboyantly dressed charlatan examines a patient’s teeth as an assistant tends to another patient’s head. These are quacks—pretenders to medical skill who attract the ignorant to a richly appointed shop where their ailments are “treated” for a fee. The procedure at right may be the “operation of the stone,” a sleight of hand that makes the doctor appear to remove a stone from the head of someone with a mental affliction. A seated skeleton with a blue cap lends a theatrical air to the composition, most likely a scene from a comedy (often the source of Quast’s subject matter) that mocked quacks and the gullible people who confuse phony posturing with medical expertise.
Information
Title
Doctor's Shop
Dates
1631
Maker
Medium
Oil on copper
Dimensions
24.8 × 34.7 cm (9 3/4 × 13 11/16 in.)
frame: 45.1 × 54.9 × 6.3 cm (17 3/4 × 21 5/8 × 2 1/2 in.)
Credit Line
Gift of Frederic Fairchild Sherman
Object Number
y80
Inscription
Monogram and date, hidden in folds of table carpet: PQ A1631.
Culture
Type
Subject
Frederic Fairchild Sherman; by 1924, gift to Princeton University Art Museum.
- Frank Jewett Mather Jr., "Painting", Art and archaeology 20, no. 3 (1925): p. 145-151., p. 146
- ed. Donna R. Barnes, Linda A. Stone-Ferrier, People at work: seventeenth Century Dutch art: [exhibition] April 17-June 15, 1988, Hofstra Museum, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, (Hempstead, NY: Hofstra Museum, 1988)., p. 24; cat. no. 14 (illus.)
