Village Barber's Shop

In a Flemish village of the 1630s, the man who shaved you was often the man who operated on you. Barbers also let blood, pulled teeth and dressed wounds, and Brouwer puts both trades into one cramped room. At the back a barber is shaving a customer. In front, a peasant is having his foot cut, with nothing at all to dull the pain. The museum singles out that face, the wince caught with real precision, and then turns to the surgeon, seen in profile and so tense that it bodes ill for the patient. Quite possibly, the museum suggests, he is a charlatan who only pretends to know anything about medicine. Brouwer painted the panel around 1632 or 1633, after he had moved back to Antwerp, and it is small, under 40 centimetres wide. Wellcome Collection in London, which grew out of the medical-history collection of the pharmaceutical businessman Henry Wellcome, owns a painted copy of this scene with the composition reversed.