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The Feast of Saint Nicholas
The Feast of Saint Nicholas. Jan Steen · Public domain · source

Jan Steen

Public domain1626-1679·Dutch·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Born in Leiden in 1626, the eldest son of Havick Steen, of a Catholic family of brewers. He enrolled at Leiden University in November 1646, trained with Nicolaus Knüpfer in Utrecht, Adriaen van Ostade in Haarlem and Jan van Goyen, and in 1648 helped found the painters' Guild of Saint Luke in Leiden. He worked in Leiden, The Hague, Delft and Haarlem, and was buried in the family grave in Leiden's Pieterskerk on 3 February 1679.

Why they matter

He is the comic storyteller of Dutch painting: feasts, taverns, family parties and disorderly households, packed with proverbs and jokes the viewer is meant to read, and painted with real refinement underneath the noise. His scenes became so proverbial that a messy household is still called, in Dutch, "een huishouden van Jan Steen". He painted roughly 800 pictures, of which about 350 survive.

What to buy

Prints: the National Gallery in London prints its paintings by him to order, on art paper or stretched canvas, framed or not; A Young Woman playing a Harpsichord to a Young Man, probably of 1659, is one of the quieter, more elegant ones and reads well on a wall. His crowded scenes are full of small jokes, so buy a print large enough to find them. Books: Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller (1996) by H. Perry Chapman, Wouter Th. Kloek and Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., the catalogue of the exhibition shared by the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Rijksmuseum, is the standard book in English: fifty paintings catalogued in detail; look for it secondhand. Originals: not realistic for most buyers. His best work is in museums, and a painting offered as his needs a specialist's opinion and a provenance before anything else.

Notes

The Mauritshuis in The Hague holds As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young, in which Steen painted himself as the man teaching a boy to smoke, and the tiny Girl Eating Oysters, about 20 by 15 centimetres, given in 1936 by Sir Henri Deterding. The Feast of St Nicholas is in the Rijksmuseum, and the National Gallery in London has several, including The Effects of Intemperance, in which children feed roses to a pig, an echo of the Dutch proverb that English renders as casting pearls before swine. The Leiden Collection, a private collection of Dutch paintings, owns twelve.

Story

Jan Steen painted so many rowdy households that his name became a Dutch byword for a messy one, and his life seems to fit the jokes. His family had run a Leiden tavern, The Red Halbert, for two generations. In 1654 his father leased him a brewery of his own in Delft, The Snake; he ran it until 1657, without much commercial success.

His marriage on 3 October 1649 to Margriet van Goyen, daughter of his teacher Jan van Goyen, became one of the best anecdotes in Arnold Houbraken's biography of 1718, which tells, very humorously, how Steen seduced and made pregnant his master's daughter and then broke the news to her father and to his own.

When the art market had its worst crisis, in 1672, the Dutch "Year of Disaster", the Leiden city council licensed Steen to run an inn. He called it The Peace. Other painters came to drink there, among them his good friend Frans van Mieris, with whom, the Leiden Collection's biography notes, he often had a drink too many. A year later, in the spring of 1673, the widower married Maria van Egmond. He died six years later.

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Rijksmuseum (The Feast of St Nicholas) ↗National Gallery, London (The Effects of Intemperance) ↗The Met ↗Rijksmuseum ↗National Gallery, London ↗Wikimedia Commons ↗

Prints

National Gallery, London custom prints (A Young Woman playing a Harpsichord to a Young Man, made to order) ↗eBay ↗Amazon ↗

Books

AbeBooks (Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller) ↗Bookshop.org ↗Amazon ↗

See also

Frans Hals 1582-1666Jacob van Ruisdael 1628-1682Judith Leyster 1609-1660Rachel Ruysch 1664-1750Adriaen van Ostade 1610-1685Gerard van Honthorst 1592-1656Pieter de Hooch 1629-1683Jan van Goyen 1596-1656

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