Nit Nurse as Muse.

At least once a year when the children were younger, the school sent home a note about the inevitability of head lice. So we would wash and comb and scream and shout as the tiny nit comb was scraped across the scalp. I only wish I’d known then what I know now; I would have felt so much more positive about inflicting such pain on my long-locked, tangle-prone daughters if I’d only known that searching for and dealing with head lice has been validated, glorified, even immortalised in art.

It turns out that the Dutch were particularly fond of the nit comb as a symbol of moral rectitude and physical beauty. Engravings and paintings from the 17th century with titles such as It Purifies and Decorates (1614, Roemer Visscher), Looking for Head Lice (1653, Gerard Ter Borch) and The Toilet (Michiel Sweerts) show mothers patiently searching their children’s hair, in a literal and metaphorical depiction of the mother’s duty to rid her family of impurity, corporeal as well as spiritual.
And so thus legitimised in my quest for cleanliness at least, I can – having hopefully, passed the wee beastie stage in my children’s development, - tackle its current equivalent, the weekly wrangle over the bedroom tidy up, with renewed vigour, maybe even zeal. Gerard Ter Borch’s painting Looking for Head Lice is at the Dutch Mauritshuis Museum. The museum’s home page is http://www.mauritshuis.nl/index.aspx?Chapterid=2295 Use their search facility to see the painting.