‘The Anemic Lady’

The picture is known as the anaemic lady, and the complaint it hints at was one that 17th-century doctors took seriously. The Dutch called it bleekzucht, pale sickness, known in English as greensickness. Physicians believed it struck young unmarried women, and the cure they recommended, more often than any medicine, was marriage. Dutch painters turned the doctor's visit into a favourite subject, and Hoogstraten gives it the full cast. The young woman sits limp in a fur-trimmed yellow jacket, her feet on a foot warmer. Behind her the doctor, dressed in black, holds a flask of her urine up to the light, the usual way of reading a patient's condition at the time, while another man looks on. A cat sits beneath the table, and Hoogstraten set his initials on the floorboards beside it.