At the Dentist

This is a copy after the Flemish painter Adriaen Brouwer, who in the 1620s and 1630s made his name painting the rough end of village life, the brawls and card games and scenes exactly like this one. A man sits pinned in a chair while a tooth-drawer leans in with his instrument. In Brouwer's day pulling teeth was not medicine as we would recognise it. It was the work of barber-surgeons and travelling toothdrawers who set up at fairs and markets, often turning the patient's pain into a bit of public theatre for the crowd. The grimace was the point, and painters returned to the subject because it let them study a face caught in real distress. Whoever made this Basel version was working from Brouwer's invention rather than from life, and the picture reached the museum in 2015 from a Basel family foundation.