Tobias healing his blind father

By 1636 Amsterdam had become a city where surgeons were learning to operate on the eye. An eye specialist named Job van Meekren, trained in the circle of the anatomist Nicolaes Tulp, was doing cataract work there around this time, and Rembrandt seems to have watched closely. It shows. The story comes from the Book of Tobit, where young Tobias cures his blind father with the gall of a fish, guided by an angel. Rembrandt turns that miracle into something he could have seen in a Dutch operating room. Tobias leans in with a fine instrument at the old man's eye and steadies his head, working with a surgeon's concentration rather than a healer's gesture. The subject stayed with him for decades. His own father, Harmen, had lost much of his sight before dying in 1630, and Rembrandt came back to blind Tobit in drawings and paintings again and again.