home>collections>european painting & sculpture>dutch & flemish painting>Teniers the Younger Search the Collection

Back | Next

David Teniers the Younger (Flemish 1610-1690)
The Surgeon, 1670s
Oil on canvas, 22-1/2 x 29 inches
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.

As seen in the Chrysler Museum painting, Teniers' works included images of the country barber-surgeon. Already in the late Middle Ages, a good many members of the professional classes -- lawyers, dentists, doctors -- were satirized by Netherlandish writers and painters, who frequently portrayed doctors as charlatans and quacks. This was especially true of the lowly traveling barber-surgeon, whose medical skills were often nonexistent and whose hapless patients usually belonged to the rural lower class. The barber-surgeon typically tended wounds, removed skin growths, let blood, administered purges and even amputated limbs. He also served as the village barber.

Teniers responded to the widespread prejudice against these pseudo-scientists by producing numerous pictures of quack doctors who study flasks of urine or operate on a gullible victim's head, foot or back. In the Museum's painting, a barber-surgeon tends to a patient's back, possibly preparing to lance a boil. At right the surgeon's young apprentice bends over a dish of glowing coals, warming a mustard plaster that will be applied to the wound. In the background an older assistant readies another patient for the doctor. The patient's rolled-up sleeve suggests that he will be bled. On the stool nearby is the barber-surgeon's shaving basin, which possibly doubled as a bleeding bowl.

Arrayed in the foreground in jugs and bottles, the doctor's various potions and medications compose a flawlessly executed sitll life. The primitive hocus-pocus of the barber-surgeon depended heavily on the pseudo-science of alchemy. In the painting both the fish skeleton and the globe suspended from the ceiling are alchemical images, and they point to the doctor's ignorant reliance on the debased, false science of alchemy. The chained monkey at the lower right carries the sharpest satiric bite of all. In contemporary European art, monkeys often appeared as symbols of foolishness, and Teniers' animal makes the association clear. He holds an apple, an emblem of the biblical Fall of Man and, thus, of humankind's sin and folly. The monkey bears witness generally to the foolishness of men who constantly run to the doctor, seeking cures for every minor ailment, when they should be tending to the health of their eternal souls. Indeed, the animal's posture "apes" the pose of the patient seated behind him. This visual pun suggests that the gullible man is, like the bound animal, a suffering victim, a captive of the doctor's stupidity and his own foolish acquiescence to it. In short, the patient is chained to his ignorance as the monekey is tied to his iron ball.

• european painting & SCULPTURE >

• dutch & flemish painting >