The Doctor's Visit

Jan Steen painted The Doctor's Visit around 1660-1670, during his time in Leiden. It is one of several versions he painted of this subject, a popular scene in Dutch genre painting. A young woman sits in a chair, her hand resting on her chest, her face pale. A doctor stands beside her, examining a flask of urine that he holds up to the light. An older woman, possibly the patient's mother, sits nearby, her expression concerned. The room is a well-furnished Dutch interior, with a bed visible behind a curtain and a view of a street through an open door. The painting is small, roughly 18 by 15 inches. The doctor's visit was a common subject in Dutch genre painting of the 17th century. The scene was usually comic rather than medical. The young woman's illness was understood as lovesickness, and the doctor was a figure of fun, a quack who diagnosed everything by examining urine. The viewer was expected to understand the joke: the woman is not really sick, she is in love, and the doctor is wasting his time. Steen painted at least six versions of the doctor's visit, each with slight variations in composition and detail. This version, in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, is one of the most finished. The figures are carefully rendered, the interior is detailed, and the narrative is clear. The doctor's expression, a mixture of concentration and self-importance, is the comic center of the painting. Steen was born in Leiden in 1626, the son of a brewer. He ran a tavern for much of his career and painted scenes of domestic chaos with the authority of someone who had seen plenty of it. His genre paintings are always narrative, always comic, and always grounded in the material reality of Dutch life. Oil on canvas, roughly 48 by 39 centimeters. Steen used a controlled palette with careful attention to the textures of fabric and furniture. The light comes from the left, falling across the doctor's face and the flask of urine. This painting works well in a study, office, or hallway. The 11x14 framed version in a black frame suits the intimate scale of the original. The painting is in the Mauritshuis, The Hague. This is a public domain artwork, sourced from Wikimedia Commons. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 24x36 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.