Jan steen paintings

Before this time he had painted a few coarsely drastic pothouse pictures, probably under the influence of Frans Hals (1582-1666) in this vein. The father-in-law was a disturbing acquisition - an excellent and successful painter, he frittered away his gains in speculating in town lots and tulip bulbs. Evidently painting ill maintained Jan Steen's rapidly growing family, for in July of 1654 we find him renting a brewery at Delft for five years. Two years later the father-in-law died, leaving nothing but debts. Still a year later his own father, on whose security the lease had been drawn, came to the rescue of the brewery business from Leiden, saving it from bankruptcy. Jan was probably an absentee manager at The Hague.

From about 1660 to 1671 Jan Steen painted at Haarlem. This is the moment of his prime and of his best pictures. In 1669 his wife, Margaret, died and a year later the apothecary seized all the pictures in Jan Steen's house and auctioned them publicly to cover a bill of ten gulden. After this chagrin Jan Steen moved back to his native Leiden, where, in 1672, he was licensed as a tavern keeper. The next year he married the widow, Maria van Egmont. His remaining six years seem to have passed in relative tranquillity. Some money probably came with the widow, and he himself had excellent personal qualifications as a host. He died in 1679, only fifty-three years old.

Artistic Composition and Subject Matter

The instability of Jan Steen's character is reflected in his fine art painting, which is of a very uneven quality. In general, his elaborate compositions with many persons are, though carefully studied in details, crowded and confused as compositions. His best pictures are those in which the comedy is played by two or three figures. All this suggests that he improvised rather than thought out many of his works.

The earliest genre-style oil paintings by Jan Steen represent bad company without attenuation. The joyous aspect of intoxication is the theme of the Revelers; its beastly aspect, that of Resting Up. Neither is particularly good, though the latter has beauties of illumination, but both illustrated the theme with a drastic and truth-telling emphasis which we shall not find again till the time of William Hogarth.

The Menagerie, 1660, was painted either at the end of his stay at The Hague or soon after his move to Haarlem. It shows him quite at his best. The exquisite figure of the seated little girl, who offers a bowl of milk to a lamb, dominates the large space. A bald-headed work-man coming in from the right with a basket of eggs, and a dwarf at the left and higher up the steps, beam upon their little queen with a courtierlike pride and affection. The platforms above and below the presiding figure are animated by domestic fowl of every decorative sort, all studied in their character from life. There is a peacock on a blasted tree to the right, and above the archway through which one glimpses between trees a moated castle, a white dove soars. Everything is considered in composition - the dark and light areas, the contrast of the obliquely presented rectangle of the pool with the formality of the arched portal. And yet the picture has the unexpectedness of a vision; one is afraid to look at it too intently lest it vanish or become something else.

A similar triumph in the visionary vein is the Bedroom, at Buckingham Palace, London. It is dated 1663. One looks through an arched doorway whose dark mass serves as a frame, beyond a lute and an open music book on the threshold, to a room shimmering with straw-yellow and pale-blue stuffs, where on a bed a pretty young woman, his wife, dressed in a yellow, furred coat and a blue skirt, sits with crossed bare legs, reaching down a fine hand to draw on a stocking. Again there is a sense of surprise and revelation, as if one had had the good luck to walk past this door and happen on this gracious apparition.

Jan Steen is rarely at the level of these two pictures. Indeed, he is best known for his pictures of large groups, family festivals, busy inn courts - so many documents of Old Holland at play. One of the earliest is Prince's Day. The birthday, November 14, of the future deliverer of Holland, William of Orange, was celebrated by the common folk, who rightly saw in him their champion against the wealthy patricians. What we have in this picture is rather a patriotic rally at an inn than a family affair. In this animated composition of some twenty figures the eye finds few points of rest. One may say that three pictures are arbitrarily juxtaposed - the group at the right behind the bald-headed man who, burlesquing a knightly act, kneels with a wooden sword before an amused young woman and an offish little group; the fine young pair at the left centre; the card-players at the left. There is some suggestion of Peter Bruegel, whose pictures Jan Steen must have known, and the comparison suggests the superiority of Bruegel's linear and flat painting, for this sort of subject, over Steen's atmospheric tonalities. Again, the big caldrons and platters in the foreground seem put in to fill an unexpected void, without plan. The defects of this picture are found in all of his more elaborate compositions.