The Quack

A crowd gathers around a mountebank on a platform, his hand raised over a patient while an assistant beats a drum to draw the onlookers in. The scene is one of Jan Steen’s most familiar compositions, a satire on credulity in which the quack’s bogus potions and the crowd’s gullibility are treated with the same amused eye he turned on Dutch household life. Steen, a tavern keeper as well as a painter, knew the marketplace world he depicted at first hand, and works like this made him the great comic moralist of the Dutch school.