The painting shows a surgical operator approaching a young woman in order to extract a tooth. One of the themes of the painting is the contrast between the two figures: he is old, she is young; his clothes are drab and scruffy, hers are colourful and neat; he is dirty and unshaven, she is well-scrubbed. At the centre of the composition, her clean pink hand is juxtaposed to his mottled grey hand, his grimy fingernails to her clear-skinned neck. She is trustingly exposing her person, he is deceptively hiding behind his back the instrument of his imminent assault. The painter was a professor at the academy of fine arts in Urbino, and one of his paintings is in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. He was a contemporary of the composer Giacomo Puccini, some of whose operas are likewise composed of sordid events among working people rather than the high deeds of gods or princes.