The Charlatan

A charlatan, or quack, has set up his little stage in the open air and is selling remedies to a curious crowd, the kind of travelling salesman every 17th-century town knew to distrust and could not resist. Van Mieris painted this around 1654, when he was still in his teens, and it is already a small tour de force, unusual for him in taking the scene outdoors rather than into a polished room. The quack was a stock target of Dutch satire, a figure for gullibility and empty promises. Look at the faces in the crowd, each one a study in wanting to believe, worked at the scale of a coin.