"Baptism ("So de oude songen, so pypen de jongen")"

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.