Twin Birth Celebration

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.