Interior of a Dutch house with an operator attending to a man's teeth. Oil painting by Hendrik van der Burgh.

Hendrik van der Burgh

Hendrik van der Burgh worked in the Hague. Like many European painters of his time he had a close attachment to Dutch paintings of the Golden Age--the seventeenth century—which he used as the model for the setting in the present work. The stillness of the spacious room in a surgeon-apothecary's house is disturbed by the reaction of the patient to the pain of the operation: as the operator digs into the gum, the patient kicks out and sends his own basket of eggs across the floor. A dog barks at the disturbance. The painting is recorded as having been auctioned in Amsterdam in 1817.