Works by Jan Steen
150 works · 289 ms
Jan Steen came from a family of Leiden brewers and painted households so rowdy that 'a Jan Steen household' became a Dutch byword for a messy scene.
In The Merry Family of 1668 an old man sings with his glass raised, a boy leans in at the window to play along, and a child puffs on a long pipe. A frying pan, a broken shell and a fallen bottle lie on the floor. A note on the chimneypiece spells out the lesson: as the old sing, so the young will twitter. Many of his pictures point to old Dutch proverbs like this one, and the small hints in them seem to warn against such behaviour rather than invite it.
Most of the dated paintings below come from the 1660s, the decade he lived in Haarlem, and most show people, often indoors. His painting of Adolf Croeser and his daughter, 1655, seats the grain merchant on the stoop of his Delft house while a poor woman and child beg from him, and it is unclear whether to call it a portrait or a genre scene. In the baker Arent Oostwaard and his wife, 1658, loaves fill the counter, pretzels hang overhead, and the boy with a horn at the right is the painter's son.
He painted himself several times, with no sign of vanity. In a self-portrait of about 1670 he sits in sober black before a red curtain; in another he grins over a lute, a tankard on the table beside him. When he put himself into other pictures, it was usually in a comic part.
Sources: Wikipedia, Rijksmuseum, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.
