Jan Steen
(1625 - February 3, 1679) |
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Genre Subjects, Mythology Narratives, Secular Narratives Art Work
| Name: |
Jan Steen |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Leiden, Holland, Dutch Republic |
| Nationality: |
Dutch |
| Birth: |
1625 |
| Death: |
February 3, 1679 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Genre Subjects, Mythology Narratives, Secular Narratives |
| Medium: |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
Dutch Golden Age |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
| Best known for his boisterous family scenes, Jan Steen actually treated a wide variety of subjects - including Bible stories, familiar proverbs, popular epigrams, and mythologies - as though they were slices of ordinary life. A few portraits are known as well. Attracted to the moralizing, as well as the richly symbolic potential of his sources, Steen was a born storyteller who literally crammed his images with meaning without ever losing a sense of directness and immediacy. He saw humanity with a sympathetic yet critical eye, simultaneously amused at the shortcomings and impressed by the strengths of his fellow human beings. In portraying a zest for life, Steen affirmed the fundamental necessity of laughter. Steen's enthusiasm for painting was inexhaustible, and his surviving oeuvre consists of some 800 paintings. Steen was born to a brewer in Leiden; his birthdate can be estimated from the document confirming his enrollment in the university of Leiden, at age twenty, in 1646. His subsequent training is still undocumented. Houbraken* states that he studied with Jan van Goyen;* Weyermann claims a period with Nicolaus Knupfer in Utrecht and Adriaen van Ostade* in Haarlem before working with van Goyen in The Hague. We can assume those studies were brief, since by 1648 Steen had joined the newly formed St. Luke's guild in Leiden. The following year he married van Goyen's daughter Margaretha. Records indicate that Steen was active in Leiden through 1654. Between 1654 and 1657 his father leased a brewery for him in Delft, but scholars doubt that he spent much time there. From 1656 to 1660 Steen resided in Warmond, not far from Leiden. By 1661 he settled in Haarlem and became a member of the city's guild. Widowed in 1669, he returned to Leiden, having inherited his father's house in 1670. Serving as hoofdman (leader) of the Leiden guild from 1671 to 1673, Steen remarried that year. In 1674 he became dean of the guild. From 1672 until his death he also operated a tavern, although Houbraken's accounts of Steen's excessive drinking are probably apocryphal. Steen evidently did not grow rich through his work. Upon his death in 1679, 500 unsold pictures reportedly remained in his studio. Despite the absence of many dated pictures and the fact that forgeries were made from the eighteenth century on, Steen's general development has been established. His earliest pictures, dating to the 1640s, were mostly outdoor scenes with numerous figures. Around 1650 he also experimented with landscapes inspired by those of Isack van Ostade, bringing into question just how important Jan van Goyen was to Steen's early training. More important was Steen's literacy; he loved contemporary poetry, particularly that of Jakob Cats, and theater, which is evident in the careful staging of his pictures. Steen's Leiden years brought him into contact with the work of Frans van Mieris the Elder,* whose influence is clearly evident in Steen's genre pictures of the late 1650s and early 1660s. His famous Girl with Oysters (dated ca. 1660, The Hague, Mauritshuis) has strong connections to the work of van Mieris with its subject, delicate technique, and polished style. The range of his subject matter in these years is demonstrated through such diverse images as Skittle Players outside an Inn (dated ca. 1660, London, National Gallery) and his Poultry Yard (signed and dated 1660, The Hague, Mauritshuis). His mastery of light, atmosphere, and spatial depth is clearly evident. Steen developed an early fascination with children, whom he painted with great humor and understanding. Steen's move to Haarlem (the home of Frans Hals*) in 1661 was decisive for his development. He clearly admired and may have collected Hals's work, since Hals's Peeckelhaering (now Leipzig) was painted into the background of Steen's The Baptism (Berlin, Dahlem Museum, Gemaldcgalcrie) and The Doctor's Visit (London, Wellington Museum, Apsley House). In response to Hals, Steen loosened his brushwork, adding a "broad" manner to his painting style, which he alternated with the "fine" manner learned from Leiden. His narratives grew bolder and his repertoire expanded to include the numerous subjects (many of them frequently repeated) that would preoccupy him for the rest of his life. His high-spirited manner and much of his epigrammatic subject matter are closely related to contemporary Flemish developments, particularly the work of Adriaen van Ostade and Jacob Jordaens,* to which Steen gave a particularly Dutch inflection. During the 1660s Steen's compositional style also grew more sophisticated, becoming the formal analogue for the tension between order and chaos that he expressed in his stories. Knit together through emphatic diagonals, his characters tend to dominate the spaces they occupy as they enact their complex stories. Rich with moral and literary allusions, Steen's pictures adopted many popular themes and invented some new ones. His portrayals of women at their toilet, women suffering from lovesickness, couples courting, and families cavorting were popular themes of the time. So were scenes of family life; but in them Steen found his most personal voice. His As the Old Ones Sing So the Young Ones Chirrup (The Hague, Mauritshuis), for example, or Beware of Luxury (also known as The Dissolute Household, signed and dated 1663, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) gave full vent to his penchant for mixing the specific with the general, fusing moral with anecdote and comedy. Steen and his family were often models for these scenes, thereby adding yet another layer of reality, and another level of humor to the densely packed images. Lest a level of meaning be lost, Steen often added texts in the hands of his characters or elsewhere in the picture. Steen's output continued unabated after his return to Leiden in the 1670s. Responding to tastes that were shifting toward the French courtly style, he introduced to his repertoire idyllic scenes of garden parties and amorous dalliances painted in a finer manner and featuring more elegant characters. These pictures are recognized as important antecedents of the fites champitres of the rococo. |
Samples of Work
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