The Physician

Gerrit Dou was Rembrandt's very first pupil, taught in Leiden as a teenager, and for a while his fame ran ahead of his master's, because he painted small things with impossible patience. Here, in 1653, a doctor holds a glass flask of urine up to the light. Reading urine, called uroscopy, was ordinary medicine then, and the man was known bluntly in Dutch as a piss-looker; the woman watching behind him hints this may be a test for pregnancy. Dou worked on a sheet of copper no bigger than a book, polishing every reflection and thread. He is said to have kept his studio sealed against dust and waited for it to settle before he lifted the brush.