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The Doctor's Visit by Follower of Jan Steen / American Art
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The Doctor's Visit

17th century Follower of Jan Steen Born: Leiden, Netherlands 1626 Died: Leiden, Netherlands 1679 oil on canvas 21 1/4 x 24 1/4 in. (54.0 x 61.6 cm.) Smithsonian American Art Museum Bequest of Mabel Johnson Langhorne 1956.11.50 Smithsonian American Art Museum
3rd Floor, Luce Foundation Center



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The Doctor's Visit
from American Art staff



This scene was likely made by a follower of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jan Steen, who painted a similar image of a woman being treated for lovesickness by a quack doctor. Steen’s paintings, copies of them, and works by his followers were popular on the American art market in the late nineteenth century. They appealed to collectors of various backgrounds, from lawyers like Ralph Cross Johnson to senators and financiers. Many of these patrons believed that the Dutch Republic was the source of American political ideals, a connection popularized through two best-selling books by nineteenth-century American historian John Lothrop Motley, who couched the Dutch struggle for independence in terms of the American Revolution. (Stott, Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art & Culture, 1998)

Keywords

Architecture Interior - domestic - bedroom

Ethnic - Dutch

Figure group

Occupation - medicine - doctor

State of being - illness - foot malady

painting

paint - oil

fabric - canvas

About Follower of Jan Steen

Born: Leiden, Netherlands 1626 Died: Leiden, Netherlands 1679

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