The Village Doctor

In 1879, when Anker painted this, a trained doctor in the canton of Bern was often a day's journey and real money away, so country people put their trust in travelling healers who carried their cures from village to village. He gave the picture a blunt German name, Der Quacksalber, the quack, though in English it has softened into The Village Doctor. The scene sets one of these self-styled healers to work inside an ordinary farming household, the kind of room Anker had known all his life. It is a fairly large canvas, about 75 by 117 centimetres, painted in the same busy year as several of his finest interiors. The German title says out loud what the English keeps quiet, that the man the family has gathered around is a quack.