Il ciarlatano

Gerrit Dou set this at the annual fair outside the city gate of Leiden in 1652. A quack doctor stands on a small platform selling his cures, waving what looks like an official diploma, his vials laid out on the table. Beside them sits a monkey, the old sign that he is making monkeys of the people who trust him. Dou, one of the Leiden fijnschilders who worked small and impossibly fine, painted himself into the scene, leaning from a window at the left with his palette in his hand, as if to weigh his own trade in illusion against the charlatan's. He gives every vial, feather and face the same patient polish, so that the swindler's worthless props are the most convincing things in the picture.