The Sick Girl

On the young woman's temple sits a small black patch. It is a mouche, a fashionable beauty spot of fabric worn to make the skin look whiter, and at some point it was mistaken for damage and painted out. It only returned with the restoration of 2010. The museum dates the panel to around 1660, when Steen lived near Leiden among its fine painters, and the care shows in the blue velvet jacket trimmed with fur and the worn cushion under the little dog. The doctor taking her pulse is the joke, since her trouble is love. Infrared images show that the dog came later. Steen first painted an open bed-warmer in its place, and the Cupid lifting his arrow on the mantelpiece was also an afterthought. His signature at lower right is made to look carved into a floorboard.