3-098-990 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

The Tooth-Puller, 1844. Scene influenced by 17th-century Flemish and Dutch painting - a humble interior with a broken barrel, a basket with meagre vegetables, perhaps appearing in the scene as paltry payment for the extraction. The boy on the left appears to be delousing himself. The tooth puller wields forceps for the extraction, which, along with the hammer visible on the floor, betray the brutality of the practice. This is accentuated by the tooth puller's brutal posture, his body completely separated from his patient to exert maximum force.