Barber Extracting a Tooth
painting by Adriaen van Ostade
Barber Extracting a Tooth is an oil-on-panel genre painting by Adriaen van Ostade, dated from c. 1630–1635. It is held in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, in Vienna.
Description
The painting depicts a genre scene in a humble barbershop, where the vaillage barber surgeon extracts a villager’s tooth under the gaze of several figures, some of whose faces appear slightly blurred. A shaft of light from the window illuminates the left side of the scene, a characteristic technique of the artist, while the right side remains in partial shadow. On the wall, a series of scissors alludes to the barbershop’s function. As was often the case, the painter favored popular themes, which he approached with great realism.
“Barber Extracting a Tooth” enters the record as painting by Adriaen van Ostade. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Barber, Extracting and Tooth can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Barber Extracting a Tooth” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Barber, Extracting and Tooth provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5719359. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1630 and 1635.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Barber Extracting a Tooth” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.