The Apothecary

When the Louvre first opened as a public museum in 1793, this small panel hung there as a work by Frans van Mieris, a Leiden painter of polished little pictures. The Paris picture dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun promptly gave it back to Metsu, and the signature written on the spine of a book in the picture bears him out. It had entered the royal collection only nine years earlier, bought for Louis XVI at a Paris sale in 1784.

The Louvre dates it to about 1661, early in Metsu's mature years. The doctor sits among his props, a sign, a book, a mortar, all set out almost too clearly, and the museum sees him as a figure from comedy, heir to the old tradition of the quack and the street apothecary. He once had a companion, a woman holding a knife and a skinned hare, recorded from 1752 and sold in Amsterdam in 1771. Soon after that sale it disappeared, probably, by one account, on a ship bound for Russia.