The Physician

Gerrit Dou's The Physician from 1653, in the Christchurch Art Gallery, depicts a doctor examining a urine flask, a common diagnostic practice in seventeenth-century medicine. The subject of the physician was popular in Dutch genre painting, often carrying satirical overtones about medical pretension. Dou, the founder of the Leiden fijnschilder school, was the highest-paid Dutch genre painter of his day, and his meticulous technique set the standard for the school of fine painters that flourished in Leiden.

Dou's characteristic window-niche composition frames the physician with trompe-l'oeil precision. The microscopic rendering of the glass flask, the physician's clothing, and the surrounding objects demonstrates the fijnschilder technique at its most refined.