The Doctor's Visit

In the Dutch Republic of the 1660s, lovesickness was more than a figure of speech. Physicians wrote about it in medical treatises as a real illness, with its own symptoms, melancholy, pallor, an erratic pulse, a lost appetite, sudden changes of mood, and the cure they usually recommended was marriage. Jan Steen painted the doctor's visit many times, and in most versions he leaves the viewer to work out the diagnosis from hints scattered around the room. Here he writes it down. The young patient holds a slip of paper, and the museum translates its Dutch words as, no medicine can help here, as this is lovesickness. So whatever the doctor at her side is doing, the answer is already in her hand. Steen painted the canvas between 1661 and 1663, in his first years in Haarlem, and it is a domestic size, about 61 centimetres high.