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Jurriaan Pool (1666-1745)
Two officers of the Amsterdam surgeons' guild, probably A. Boekelman and Jan Six. Signed and dated JPool f 1699. Canvas, 73 × 114 cm.

Amsterdam, Amsterdams Historisch Museum, cat.nr. 346, inv.nr.A 3031 (on loan to Museum Boerhaave, Leiden). Presented to the city in 1864 under the same circumstances as cat. nr.69).

Looking at this painting next to Werner van der Valckert's group portrait with skeleton of eighty years earlier, we feel ourselves present at the transition from the age of the generalist to that of the specialist. The earlier anatomical portraits still seem to exemplify a religious message such as the one put into words by Joost van den Vondel, in his poem on Cornelis Plemp's translation into Dutch of an anatomical textbook by Cabrious:

'Know thyself' were words engraved
Above a Delphic architrave
As enlightenment divine
From the mistress of that shrine.
Today the same is taught to us
By doctors like wise Cabrious...
He who seeks to comprehend
From beginning until end
What our human skins encase,
What keeps all our parts in place,
How the wisdom of the Lord obtains
Throughout our nerves, throughout our veins,
How artists all are put to shame
By the artful human frame –
Should he help one man succeed
To know himself and then proceed
To knowledge of God's nature too,
Then Plemp will feel he's had his due.

Pool's painting, on the contrary, looks more like a consultation between a heart specialist and a medical technician on a matter that touches both their fields.

The painter was not a stranger to the world of the sitters. He was the son-in-law, since 1695, of one of the foremost physicians in the city, Frederick Ruysch. Mevrouw Pool was Rachel Ruysch herself an outstanding flower painter.

Schwartz 1965, p.144.