The Quack Doctor; Le Charlatan by Carl Ernst Hess [1755-1828].

Stipple engraving, with etching and engraving, good margins, A fine engraving of a celebrated painting now in Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam. The doctor below a parasol outside a house in Leiden offers a phial to a group of onlookers including a woman changing a baby. On his desk is a bleeding bowl, a monkey and a document with a seal no doubt purporting to be a medical diploma. The artist himself is seen leaning out of the window holding his brushes and palette. In the 19th century when it was at Munich, Dou's painting was considered one of twelve most important paintings in the Old Royal Pinakothek.Part of the imprint states 'In Mons.r Pigage's Catalogue of the Dusseldorf Gallery this Subject is No.63'. Valentine and Rupert Green published mezzotints and engravings after paintings in the Dusseldorf Gallery, having secured the privilege from the elector Carl Theodor in 1789. In 1793, they had exhibited in Spring Gardens, London painted copies of some of the paintings they were going to make engravings of, to encourage subscribers. The cost of producing the engravings on such a large scale and to such high quality proved their undoing and led to bankruptcy, with only twenty-one engravings being printed. Carl Ernst Christoph Hess had come to Dusseldorf in 1777 at the behest of Lambert Krahe, the director of the gallery, who had himself hoped to produce a set of engravings of the gallery's pictures. His stipple engravings were considered in the 19th century to be among the finest of the group. Louis Marchesano, Curator of Prints at the Getty Institute, considers, ''Hess not only translated the contours and details of the various characters and objects that populate the composition but also used a sophisticated graphic vocabulary to capture the quality of light and sense of textures and reality that made the painting so rightly famous'. This impression is dated three years before the British Museum print, a state which has not been previously recorded. It seems natural that this painting would be one of the earliest to be engraved by the Greens as in their 1793 exhibition the Dou had been one of the few paintings to be copied at its full size and the picture had been greeted with popular acclaim.See Gaehtgens, T & Marchesano, L. 'Display & Art History: The Dusseldorf Gallery and Its Catalogue' Getty Institute, 2011.