STEEN, Jan

Close to Jacob Jordaens, Steen often painted the same subjects as the Flemish artist, but he never employed the Antwerp master’s ponderous fashion. “So de oude songen, so pypen de jongen,” meaning “As the old sing, the young pipe,” was a Netherlandish proverb both painters liked. In his work of that name, sometimes entitled Baptism, Steen orchestrates this comparison of extremes of youth and age into a symphony sensitive to life stages, of the very young learning from the very old in a cycle of life and death along with renewal and rebirth.

The complex, multi-figure composition probably represents several proverbs the meaning of them is not completely known. Although the scene depicted here in many respects recalls the unruly “household of Jan Steen” - images painted by Steen that purportedly reflect his own life and household - its content is far more complex. It is true that the depiction contains scores of references to the “dissolute household”, a motif that Steen embroidered on countless paintings, yet quite correctly the picture once was called a proverb painting.

The idea of proverb painting recalls the famous one by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Steen presumably knew this painting or one of its copies by his son. It is also possible that Steen relied on a print with a collection of proverbs.

In this painting a comical figure is greeting a young woman in an interior. The comical elderly figure making the theatrical bow to the young woman who turns to observe him is dressed as the Commedia dell’Arte figure of Pantaleone. Above the elderly jester hangs an empty birdcage. Steen painted a similar birdcage in many other paintings, for example the Beanfeast, dated 1668 (Staatliche Museen, Kassel). The Kassel painting also shows the same sort of Commedia dell’Arte figure who, beside wearing the same Pantaleone costume, plays a rommelpot, to emphasize his role as a fool who is after the attention of the comely girl.

As in so many of his works, Jan Steen has here included a caricature of his own features in the face of the amused peasant who turns to observe the comic encounter behind him.

Various of Jan Steen’s works contain direct and indirect references to chambers of rhetoric, the lively societies where artisans, traders, academics and artists met to organise various literary and theatrical activities. Between the late 15th century and the end of the 17th century they were to provide the bridge between medieval passion plays and the professional, elite theatre and opera which developed from then on. Even so Jan Steen, unlike many of his painter contemporaries, never belonged to a chamber and we cannot assess unambiguously from his work how he judged this socio-cultural phenomenon. Nor does this painting, produced around ¹⁶⁶⁵⁄₆₈, and very important for its documentary value alone, offer any definitive answer. It is true that the artist portrays himself here as a highly amused spectator among the audience that is paying its respects in the door of an inn where a “declamator”, the speaker of the society, is reading a text. In so doing he appears to declare himself a sympathiser. In the meantime the goings-on inside the same inn would tend to confirm the rhetoricians’ reputation as liking their liquor. Given that, in the mid-17th century, it was “bon ton” amongst a certain social class to dismiss rhetoricians as literary dimwits, bickerers and incorrigible revellers, we are again all of a sudden uncertain on whose side the artist in fact was.

Almost all the figures and physical signs identifying a rhetorical chamber as such can be found in the painting: apart from the declamator, announcing his performance with the large drum, we can suppose the serious-looking man behind him to be the “factor” or poet. The “emperor” or “prince”, the flagbearer and the fool are recognisable by the respective attributes: a crown, a flag and a dunce’s cap with a cock’s feather. A crock and a drinking beaker hang outside the open door, which is partly shaded off by a carpet, an essential item of d�cor during performances. A quatrain, attached to a wreath of flowers, announces the philosophy of life of the happy band. Until now it has not been possible to establish which society carried the motto “In liefde vrij ” (Free in love) in its blazon, the traditional diamond-shaped shield hanging on the wall.

Steen was a storyteller with a passion for drawing moral conclusions in his numerous pictures based on the Scripture, old proverbs, aphorisms, and emblems. Much of Steen’s moralizing is based upon familiar platitudes. ‘Easy come, easy go’ was a favourite. Here, Steen has depicted the proverb ‘As the old sing, so pipe the young’, meaning that a bad example leads to bad conduct. He frequently includes an inscription in his paintings to make his meaning clear. Many of his exuberant pictures of families around a festive table, where grown-ups, children, and animals make an ingenious hotch-potch, are designed to illustrate well-known proverbs. This is the subject of the group eating, making music, drinking, smoking, laughing and shouting in this picture at the Mauritshuis.

Here Steen introduced himself giving a boy a a pipe, and there have been attempts to identify three generations of his family in the painting. The old woman sings the song written on the sheet of paper she holds:

“As we sing you’ll have to chirrup, / It’s a law the whole world knows. / I lead, all follow suit, / From baby to centenarian.”

In this major work, which is large in size and broader in execution than most, an abundance of animating details illustrate the obvious moral. It was executed when Steen was in Haarlem and had the opportunity to study at firsthand a number of Frans Hals’s pictures. The tonality is light, and the dominant hues are Steen’s favourite ones: violet, rose, salmon-red, pale yellow, and bluish-green.

The sitter, a prominent citizen of Delft, is depicted with his daughter at the front door of a house on the Oude Delft. Presumably he actually did live on the Oude Delft but it may not be assumed that the modern house on the left in the picture and its location corresponded closely with reality. The bridge to the right appears to have been placed arbitrarily for formal reasons and in order to support the city crest of Delft and a passing witness to the home owner’s concern for the poor. The size and arrangement of the trees behind the sitter have clearly been calculated to frame the two adult figures, the tower of the Oude Kerk, and, over the man’s shoulder, the Prinsenhof, where the Chamber of Charity met.

Jan Steen was one of the most popular of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century. His gay and animated genre-scenes were highly appreciated, both by his contemporaries and by collectors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was a pupil of Nicolaus Kn�pfer in Utrecht and of his father-in-law, Jan van Goyen, and lived and worked for varying periods of time in nearly every large town in Holland.

His range of subjects was extremely wide; he painted both villages and towns, peasants and well-to-do citizens; his vividly coloured, broadly constructed compositions depict taverns, sick-rooms, fairs, workshops and weddings, mythological and historical scenes in the spirit of the Dutch oratorical groups of his time, as well as character figures and a few portraits.

Steen often depicted his family and himself, as indeed he has done in this picture, where he, his wife and his children are seen carousing. The work gets its alternative title of “The Cat Family” from the basket of new-born kittens held by the girl at the back of the circle.

This picture splendidly summarizes the art of Steen - and Dutch genre as a whole. The centre of the family circle is the cat family in the basket on the table. Everybody is happy, gay and completely relaxed. The artist indicates our senses as the main source of pleasure: hearing makes us enjoy music; the sense of touch enables us to enjoy stroking the cats; the sense of taste and smell are satisfied by drinking; and our sight conveys the delight of reading an amusing story. The latter joy is represented by the figure of the artist himself, for the reader is a self portrait. The pleasing figure of a woman seen with her back to the onlooker could be the pleasure-giving muse of genre painting-if genre painting ever had such a muse. And if there were no such muse, then she must be considered to be Steen’s most captivating figure of a woman, whose face, however, was apparently not worthy of the painter’s brush.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 9 minutes):

Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto in C major RV 180 (Il Piacere, The Pleasure)

The reader is a self portrait.

This painting depicts a dissolute, drunken tavern scene with the laughing Steen as Democritean painter-philosopher at the far right.

In this scene of sensual character the visitor pays for the admission in the door, and the lady expects him stretching in an armchair.

The voluptuous lady leaning back with one elbow resting on a cushion, wineglass in hand, expects payment from her visitor: the young man at the door is giving money to the old woman leaning on her stick. There is a discreetly curtained bed in the corner of the room and on the wall a picture in which one figure is seen driving a second from an open doorway. The details have been carefully observed and the whole scene depicted with irony. The picture is a splendid example of Steen’s later period.

This panel depicts figures before an inn, merry-making and playing a game of kolfspel (a precursor of today’s golf).

In 17th-century Dutch culture, a woman’s main charge was to give birth to and raise children. Most parents greeted the birth of a child with happiness and pride, for emotional, and, particularly in the case of sons, economic reasons. A son frequently took over a father’s business or trade and would inherit the family’s possessions and perpetuate its name. The economic and social benefits of mariage made monogamy imperative. Cuckoldry and illegitimate children caused shame - or mirth, if they befell others.

This painting by Steen of revelers in a lying-in room suggests elation by its busy conversation, laughter, and drinking, as well as its bright colour scheme. Most of the visitors are women: men, including the father, were considered out of place at these events, useful only for money to sustain the celebration. The aging father in Steen’s painting awkwardly holds the children as he reaches into his purse for more funds. He has good reason to be uncomfortable, as a younger man mocks him with two fingers behind his head, marking him a cuckold who may not know that his child is not his. The joke is in keeping with comic accounts of birth celebrations as gathering of crones and maidens gossiping about sex. Midwives and nurses were considered primary perpetrators of such transgressive talk. Their unclear status, always moving between households, made them mythic purveyors of bawdy chatters. As elsewhere, loquaciousness was generally found more appropriate for men than for women.

Although Steen’s interior is up-to-date for a middle-class family of the 1660s, his nursery celebration seems old-fashioned for that period, exaggerated to comic effect.

There are several versions of this subject by Jan Steen.

The melodramatic ailment of the patient is mocked as much as the pretentious demeanour of the doctor, who pontificates but may be missing the true problem. Steen made the point, a common motif of comedies, by giving the doctor an outmoded, perhaps theatrical costume, by letting the boy Cupid smile knowingly at the viewer, and by inserting a famous comic painting, Frans Hals’s Jester Pickle-Herring at top right.. Contemporary jokes also ridiculed doctors for their inability to diagnose pregnancy, a condition here indicated by the mythic pregnancy test of a ribbon dipped in urine, smouldering in the brazier.

Rhetoricians (in Dutch: Rederijkers) were members of amateur dramatic and literary societies called Rederijkerskamers. Membership was not limited to literary figures: many painters, including Carel van Mander, Hendrick Goltzius, Frans Hals and Adriaen Brouwer were rederijkers. Jan Steen is not known to have been a member, but their public activities, often comic, would obviously have appealed to him. He painted several other pictures depicting them.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 2 minutes):

Franz Schubert: Drinking song from the 16th century D 847, quartet

This is one of the five garden parties painted during the final phase of Steen’s career. It depicts the alfresco leisure activities of the affluent and evokes precedents by painters of an older generation: Gerbrandt van den Eeckhout, Jacob van Loo, and especially David Vinckboons.

It is true that the depiction contains scores of references to the “dissolute household”, a motif that Steen embroidered on countless paintings, yet quite correctly the picture once was called a proverb painting. In this detail, the young man casts roses at the pig, and Steen is thus referring to the proverb “Strooit geen rozen voor de varkens” (literally: Do not spread roses before pigs [i.e. To cast pearls before swine]), generally used to connote the offering of something valuable to somewhat who is not cultured enough to appreciate it.

It is true that the depiction contains scores of references to the “dissolute household”, a motif that Steen embroidered on countless paintings, yet quite correctly the picture once was called a proverb painting. In this detail, the seemingly pious couple must have a meaning of its own given the duck on the man’s shoulder. He can be identified as a “quacker”, or a Quaker, a zealous Mennonite. The woman may be a begijn, a Catholic woman who had taken a vow of chastity, but was not part of a monastic order: begijnen or sanctimonious hypocrites were also considered zealots. While the role of these two figures is clear, they have yet to be linked to a fitting aphorism.

It is true that the depiction contains scores of references to the “dissolute household”, a motif that Steen embroidered on countless paintings, yet quite correctly the picture once was called a proverb painting. In this detail, the little monkey stopping the clock at the upper right recalls the moral “In dwaasheid vergeet men de tijd” (In foolishness time is forgotten).

Jan Steen, who leased a brewery in 1654, painted a number of scenes in inns. The situations he paints cannot be relied upon to be completely realistic however, as their intention is satirical.

Amongst the genre scenes that brought Steen popularity and fame, there are almost twenty showing a doctor’s visit to a bourgois home. As theatrical as any Commedia dell’arte play, they present scenes full of misunderstandings, secrets, assumptions and indiscretions. The “illnesses” of the patients are generally unforeseen pregnancy or lovesickness. The bed with the painting of lovers hanging over it, and the statue of Amor on the draughtscreen of the door immediately indicate to the spectator what is going on. The basin of coals in the foreground with the burning thread - quack doctors diagnosed pregnancy by “reading” the smoke - and the maid with her suitor at the door are further typical features of this genre. The patient, whose pulse the doctor is counting, has a note in her hand on which the following words are written: “Daar baat gen/medesyn/want het is/minepeyn” (“No medicine can cure the pain of love”).

Though hardly a profound insight, these words constitute a moral of the kind that is almost invariably to be found behind these types of Dutch paintings. For all the autonomy of the subject matter, a painting without such a “deeper” meaning would have been inconceivable at the time, and indeed did not actually emerge until the 19th century.

In this picture the painter depicts the scene of a forced marriage.

This late painting by Jan Steen is eclectic both in subject and style. The painter blends several themes (the dissolute household, the Garden of Love, child rearing) into an original composition, and he combines the manners of Gerard Terborch and the Flemish Jacob Jordaens.

During the 1670s, when Steen returned to Leiden and was apparently active as an innkeeper, he continued to be prolific. Large subject pictures and genre scenes, as well as tiny, carefully finished paintings, were made during his last years. There is an increasing elegance and an occasional use of glossy paint during this phase, but his sharp wit and good humour are not affected at all. In some of these late works there is already a premonition of Watteau’s elegant idylls. The Nocturnal Serenade shows a whole group dressed and masked as Italian comedians; the theme is one Rococo painters were to use frequently. The slightly elongated proportions of Steen’s masquers are already closer to those used by eighteenth-century artists than to the ones employed by his own contemporaries.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 7 minutes):

Franz Schubert: Ständchen (Serenade), Franz Liszt’s transcription

Jan Steen treated the subject of a schoolroom interior several times during his career. His talent for storytelling is given free rein in the present composition, in which the children fill the entire scene, let loose to take as much advantage of their sleeping teacher as possible.

The painting belongs to a long tradition of schoolroom representations, which find their origin in a composition by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

The painting is signed and dated lower left: JSteen . 1672.

The painter’ss talent for storytelling is given free rein in the present composition, in which the children fill the entire scene, let loose to take as much advantage of their sleeping teacher as possible.

The boy beside him has stolen his glasses and pokes his own pipe through his cap, while another blows on what looks like a pea-shooter with full force towards the master’s face. These misdemeanours appear as nothing in comparison to the exploits of the youngsters in the foreground, one of whom urinates into an earthenware jug held by his friend, while another wipes the bottom of a child and holds the soiled cloth up to her schoolmaster’s nose.

The subject is the celebration of Vastenavond (Shrove Tuesday), the festival preceding the period of Lent. It is celebrated in some countries by consuming pancakes. The boy at left plays a rommelpot, the small girl joyously holds aloft a waffle.

The rommelpot is a Dutch friction drum, in which the sound is primarily produced by the vibration of a tightly stretched membrane. The instrument shown in the present painting consists of an animal bladder stretched across an earthenware pot or jug and manipulated by a reed stick. It made a particularly raucous sound.

This splendid, large-scale painting shows a typical Dutch combination of biblical or mythological history painting with the characteristics of narrative genre painting. It depicts a scene from Abraham Koninck’s 1618 play, The Tragedy of Samson, a parable of false love.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 10 minutes):

Camille Saint-Saens: Samson et Delila, Delila’s aria

In this self-portrait Steen followed the example of famous painters, such as Titian and Rembrandt. Steen painted his likeness several times in genre scenes, usually in comic roles.

On the basis of Steen’s only traditional self-portrait in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, he has been identified in various guises as the principal subject or as one of the mirthful, debauched or licentious participants in dozens of of his paintings of various themes. For example, he presents himself dressed in the archaic costume worn by actors who played the part of lovers in his Self-Portrait as a Lutenist.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 2 minutes):

Francesco da Milano: Tre fantasie for lute

This idyllic landscape, with skittle players and figures seated on the grass outside The White Swan inn, is an unusual subject for Jan Steen, who is best known as a painter of rowdy domestic and tavern interiors. Steen’s work was unusual in its wide range of subject-matter in an age which encouraged specialization. Steen moved from town to town, and this apparent restlessness of temperament is reflected in the unevenness of his output. Often in financial difficulties, Steen was not above hack-work. At his best, however, as in this painting which probably dates from around 1660, Steen can rise to a level of technical skill and lyrical mood rarely achieved by even the greatest of Dutch painters.

The early seventeenth century saw the rapid urbanization of the north Netherlands: Amsterdam, Leiden, Haarlem and The Hague were among the cities which underwent a huge expansion. It was a popular recreation for the citizens of Holland’s overcrowded towns to visit inns in the countryside. In Les Delices de la Hollande, published in Leiden in 1678, the French author Parival commented on the popularity of such outings: ‘ ‘Whenever one goes here [into the countryside], one finds as many people as would be seen elsewhere in a public procession. All these excursions end up at one of the inns which are to be found everywhere …. These inns are always packed with visitors, and the confused murmur of many voices is like the sound in a city square. These are inexpensive pleasures which all, even the humblest labourer, can share.’ As can be seen from Steen’s painting, some enterprising landlords provided entertainment for their customers, in this case skittles, which was a popular game in the Netherlands.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 21 minutes):

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Trio in E Flat Major (Kegelstatt) K 498

Jan Steen was Europe’s greatest Baroque chronicler of fresh festivity, recording how those celebrations of faith, folk, and family illumined an often harsh life for middle and lower classes alike. Tavern Garden shows Steen at his best - witty, adroit, compassionate, but never sentimental. The ironic, smiling figure holding a basket is probably the Dutch painter himself, a participant in the merriment. Also a tavern keeper or brewer, this great painter may have been the keenest Baroque analyst of the tragicomedy of human collectivity.

In a seventeenth-century living-room, a cheerful company has assembled to enjoy the so-called ‘Bean Feast on Twelfth Night’ (the feast of the Epiphany, 6 January). In accordance with an old and widespread custom that still survives in many places, a bean was baked into a cake and the person who found it in their portion was given a paper crown and made king for the night, with the power to appoint companions to various positions, such as that of court jester. And whenever the king raised his glass, the others did the same, shouting out ‘The king drinks!’

In Jan Steen’s picture, men, women and children form a cheerful crowd around the dining table, some in the fashionable middle-class dress of the day, while some are wearing different household utensils on their heads. Wearing the king’s crown is a boy who stands on a small table, being helped to drain his glass by an elderly woman beside him. The jester, identified by the inscribed scrap of paper in his cap, is on his feet in front of the table, providing a rhythmical accompaniment with an earthenware pot and a small stick. On the far left, an older man with a metal funnel on his head has made a fiddle and bow from a ladle and a roasting spit, while someone else at the back is playing a real violin. On the opposite side, clearly keeping their distance, is a more genteel group gathered around a preacher and taking no part in the merriment. The painter and his wife, however, have joined in the disorderly celebration, being seated at table in the middle of the painting.

This painting ranks among the most important pictures painted by the artist during his initial Haarlem period. It depicts a scene of utter chaos and parental abandon. Similarly to a sizeable number of his paintings, Steen inserted himself into the picture (the figure of the pipe-smoker bears his facial feature).

In the 1660s Jan Steen painted this subject and closely related themes in several variations. According to Arnold Houbraken in his biography of Steen, these paintings are emblems of the artist’s disorderly household. This is confirmed by the fact that Steen used members of his immediate family as models. The central figure is a self-portrait.

The painting represents the the artist himself and his wife, Margarete van Goyen, daughter of the famous landscape painter Jan van Goyen.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

Otto Nicolai: Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor), drinking song

The detail shows the self-portrait of the artist.

Even today a ‘Jan Steen household’ is what the Dutch call a boisterous and ramshackle family. Jan Steen painted many such families, often including his own portrait as a pipe-smoking, beer-drinking, cheerful rake. His prolific output, during a career when he was constantly on the move from town to town, and the very high quality of much of his work, should make us beware of a literal interpretation of this raffish portrayal of the artist. One of the many Dutch seventeenth-century painters who remained Catholics, Steen is a moralist, but he relies on popular proverbs, the popular theatre and festive customs to preach through laughter at the human comedy: people like ourselves behaving as they shouldn’t.

Not all his paintings are of this kind. E.g. the landscapelike Skittle Players outside an Inn, which despite its subject seems to make no disparaging comment on the people taking their ease in the summer sunshine, or a late Two Men and a Young Woman making Music on a Terrace, which anticipates the eighteenth-century painter Watteau’s lyrical and melancholy compositions. Steen also painted biblical and mythological subjects and portraits. While many of his pictures are small; the Effects of Intemperance is on a larger scale and demonstrates the broader touch he may have learned from Hals during his nine-year stay in Haarlem.

The woman on the left is that most reprehensible creature, a Dutch housewife and mother who is not teaching her children virtue. She has slumped in drunken slumber, her clay pipe slipping from her hand. The little coal brazier by her side threatens to set fire to her gown, and her child is picking her pocket. Above her head hangs a basket in which the fate of those who grow up without parental guidance is foretold: it contains the crutch and clapper of the beggar and the birch of judicial punishment. Another child illustrates a Dutch proverb by throwing roses (we would say ‘pearls’) before swine, while the trio to the right waste a good meat pie by feeding it to a cat. The parrot, that mimic of human behaviour, is drinking wine given to him by the maid, as luxuriously dressed as her mistress and almost as tipsy, while in the arbour beyond a man, perhaps the father, is dallying with a buxom girl - ‘wine is a mocker’ indeed, as the saying goes.

Just as the ancient painter Zeuxis painted grapes so realistically that birds came to peck at them, so may we, attracted by Steen’s ravishing still life in the foreground, the glow of pewter and the shimmer of silks, be drawn to taste his wares. Through looking deep into his picture, we may yet reform our ways and so avoid the effects of intemperance.

Jan Steen frequently incorporated the members of his family into his genre scene. In this painting the man carving the ham is a self-portrait, while the housewife in the armchair is his wife Margareta.

The painting is signed bottom left: JSteen

Steen painted at least six pictures of the Feast of St Nicholas, the festival traditionally dedicated to Dutch children. On the eve of 5 December, St Nicholas comes to the Netherlands from Spain to leave appropriate gifts in the shoes of children. The good ones receive cakes, sweets, and toys; the naughty ones get canes and coals. The finest version of this theme is in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

A complicated play of diagonals helps bind the family of ten together - from the heap of special pastries to the man pointing to the chimney on the right, where St Nicholas made his entry, and from the carved table covered with sweets up to the girl holding the shoe with the distressing birch-rod. Figures which lean in one direction are balanced by those leaning in the other; foreground and background, right and left are held together by gestures, glances, and expressions which give the painting familial as well as pictorial tautness. The smiling boy who points to the shoe makes the onlooker part of this family scene by smiling directly out at him or her. The colouristic effect is brilliant, and does not lack unification or become too diffuse, as is sometimes the case in Steen’s work.

The painting shows an ordinary interior with ordinary people, in a straightforward way, not particularly embellished. Yet, in this deceptively natural painting a moral is hiding. This is not a scene casually glimpsed but the presentation of a scene; it is presented, literally, by drawing up a curtain. This drawn-up curtain has a special function: it calls the scene to the viewer’s attention: ‘now look at this.’

What the viewer sees are people, young and old, male and female, drinking and playing and, above all, eating a lot of oysters. As oysters were a conventional aphrodisiac, they became a common sexual symbol - and their abundance gives this picture an unambiguous erotic meaning. But then, almost exactly where in the middle of the curtain is drawn up highest, a young boy is hiding in the attic, blowing bubble; a skull is next to him. The connotation of the skull is clear enough - and so to the contemporary audience, was the boy. He is the illustration of a classic adage: ‘homo bulla’ - ‘man is a bubble.’ The inclusion of this symbol of the insignificance of worldly pursuits unavoidably changes the meaning of this painting.

From the mid 1650s through the 1660s, Leiden artists, including Gerrit Dou, and Gabriel Metsu, depicted scenes with quack doctors attending dispirited women. Jan Steen himself treated the theme at least twenty times within the same period. Although artists from other cities, such as Samuel van Hoogstraten, also addressed the subject, the popularity of doctors as figures of amusements also reflects the prominence of the medical faculty at Leiden University, where doctors from all over the Netherlands received their training.

It should be noted that there is a resemblance between the lovesick maiden and D�rer’s famous engraving with the personification of Melancholy.

An explicit reference to the maiden’s affliction is the pair of dogs copulating in the foyer, a motif probably borrowed by Frans van Mieris the Elder’s Brothel Scene.

The feel for an entertaining story, the ability to combine the humourous and the serious, and a keen observation of everyday life made Steen one of the most outstanding representatives of 17th-century Dutch genre painting.

This bucolic meal, set for one, contrasts with Steen’s usually jolly, rowdy repasts. The smiling bumpkin violinist plays, the man on the bench - perhaps the seated young woman’s father - sings.

The girl is shown in a state of undress, provocatively pulling on her stocking and looking directly - and invitingly - at the spectator. The erotic character of this delicately painted and boldly coloured panel cannot be doubted. It has been argued that she is probably a prostitute - above the arch is Cupid and beside her bed a jewel-case - and yet the scene, framed in an archway, gives few real clues as to her status. We may, in fact, simply be glimpsing a desirable young woman at her toilet. The lute and the music book in the archway (as well as Cupid) associate the scene with the pleasures of love, while the skull wreathed in vine leaves reminds us that such pleasures are fleeting. The chamber pot is a characteristically realistic and down-to-earth element, while the archway with its Corinthian columns and swags of flowers frames this all-too-human scene in a mock grandiose manner.

Today we may admire not just the illusionism, the amusing conceit of the subject but also the remarkable skill with which Steen described the rush-carpet, the canopied bed, the tiled floor and all the other details which go to make up this rich and intricate composition.

This is a simplified version of the same subject, painted at approximately the same date, now in the Royal Collection, Windsor. This composition lacks the archway and the vanitas still-life in the foreground, while the pose of the woman is more alluring here.

Any seventeenth-century viewer would have easily recognized what readily escapes viewers today: the oysters are laden with carnal overtones. According to the ancient mythographers, Aphrodite (known to the Romans as Venus), was conceived in an oyster shell which subsequently transported her to the island of Cyprus. To ancient and early modern minds, Aphrodite symbolized love, sex, and fertility; such concepts were also linked, by association, to oysters.

This interior depicts an elderly man at a desk surrounded by insignia of humanistic scholarship and applied science, including a globe, folios, an alembic, and a shawn. The scholar has paused in his writing to reflect and seems not to be aware that there are others in the room: next to him is a young boy with a wreath of ivy in his hair, holding out an hourglass with the sand run through, a symbol of transience. Behind the boy is a man in a coat and soft cap, who points toward the scene at the desk with his left hand. Death in the form of a skeleton appears in the doorway in the background on the right, accompanied by a weeping little boy carrying a urine specimen in a small basket. This is an allusion of urine as a diagnosis method, suggesting that the scholar is about to hold a medical consultation.

This subject is unusually serious for Jan Steen. The painter drew inspiration from several sources, among the Hans Holbein the Younger’ Dance of Death woodcut series, and Johannes Vermeer’s Astronomer.

Steen’s years in Haarlem were the most productive and important of his career. His most successful works during this period self-consciously and playfully subvert the wholesome imagery that had become so fashionable during the economically heady decades following the Treaty of Minister. For instance, paintings of children at school, a theme popularised by Gerrit Dou, resounded with references to learning, vigilance, and studiousness. But in Steen’s hand serious instructors and conscientious pupils are replaced by aged dimwits in outlandish attire who are either completely oblivious to their charges’ mischief or aggressively mete out discipline with their omnipresent wooden spoons.

This painting depicts a sick woman and a doctor in an interior. At the wall in the background there is a bed; on the wall a lute, and a clock can be seen.

Jan Steen was born in Leiden but is said to have studied with Nicolas Kn�pfer in Utrecht, Adrian van Ostade in Haarlem and Jan van Goyen, whose daughter he married in 1649, in The Hague. He continued to move from town to town, being recorded in The Hague, Leiden and Delft during the course of his career. He was an enormously prolific painter who concentrated on lively genre scenes, although he also painted portraits and religious and mythological subjects. His work, which is markedly uneven in quality, is characterized by a robust humour, a sense of theatre and, often, a moralizing intention.

Steen’s The Village School is in the satirical tradition of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s print The Ass at School which illustrates a popular saying: ‘Though an ass goes to school in order to learn, he’ll still be an ass, not a horse, when he returns’. In Steen’s school there is little to be learnt from the short-sighted teacher who is so intent on sharpening his quill that he fails to notice the chaos around him. Some children who are keen to learn have gathered around the schoolmistress who corrects their spelling but others fight, sing, make fun of the teachers and even sleep. On the right a child hands a pair of spectacles to an owl, a familiar symbol of foolishness in Steen’s work.

This painting depicts the traditional Flemish celebration of Whitsuntide, the first day of Summer. It shows a procession of children standing before the door of a home. Still observed in some parts of Flanders today, the festival centres around a girl chosen to be the Whitsun Bride (Pinksterbloem). She wears a crown decorated with wild flowers in her hair, a pink apron over a white dress, and is adorned with jewellery. Leading a procession of youngsters singing traditional songs and playing instruments, the bride stops at each house to collect donations for the local parish.

Even the ritual of the lying-in visit, associated with childbirth, was not spared Steen’s parodying brush. In the Twin Birth Celebration he depicts a hilarious and witty scene of a flustered elderly father who is mocked by a throng of clamorous women as he receives his newborn twins. Steen’s old man must be impotent — since common wisdom held that the aged were infertile — and therefore completely incapable of having sired one infant, let alone two. A younger, virile man must have fathered them as the old fool, much to his consternation, has suddenly realized.