The Charlatan

Philibert-Louis Debucourt, a French painter and printmaker, was best known for small-scale scenes of French peasant life painted in the Flemish style. He frequently made engravings after both his own and other artists' works and was elected to the Académie Royale in Paris in 1781. The Charlatan was a popular theme among eighteenth-century genre painters including Pietro Longhi and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo; here Debucourt depicts the quack doctor in a vibrant red jacket and hat, energetically selling his faux remedies to the attentive crowd gathered before his platform.