The Doctor's Visit

Jan Steen, Dutch, born Leiden, Netherlands 1626-died Leiden, Netherlands 1679 · 17th century

This scene was likely made by a follower of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jan Steen, who painted a similar image of a woman being treated for lovesickness by a quack doctor. Steen’s paintings, copies of them, and works by his followers were popular on the American art market in the late nineteenth century. They appealed to collectors of various backgrounds, from lawyers like Ralph Cross Johnson to senators and financiers. Many of these patrons believed that the Dutch Republic was the source of American political ideals, a connection popularized through two best-selling books by nineteenth-century American historian John Lothrop Motley, who couched the Dutch struggle for independence in terms of the American Revolution. (Stott, Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art & Culture, 1998)