Steen, Jan Havickszoon

Steen, Jan Havickszoon (1626-1679), Dutch painter who is known especially for his prolific output as a genre painter of lively interior scenes that sometimes depict Dutch festivals or illustrate proverbs. These were possibly intended as moral instruction as well as entertaining records of daily life.

Steen was born in Leiden, the son of a fairly prosperous brewer. Little is known of his early life and training as a painter. In 1646 he enrolled at the University of Leiden but left after a year, presumably to train as a painter. Arnold Houbraken in his De Groote Schouburgh (Amsterdam, 1721) mentions that Steen trained first with the Utrecht painter Nicholas Knupfer, then in Haarlem with Adriaen van Ostade, and finally with Jan van Goyen, whose daughter, Grietje, he married in 1649.

Two of Steen’s earliest works, Winter Landscape (c. 1650, Skokloster Castle, Balsta) and The Lean Kitchen (c. 1650, National Gallery, Ottawa) show the influence of two of them; in Winter Landscape, the low horizon, tonalism, and naturalistic sky effects are reminiscent of van Goyen, while the rough peasants in The Lean Kitchen are characterized with the biting satire of Ostade. A number of Steen’s other paintings of the 1650s are outdoor scenes, in which figures become more numerous and tonal shades of browns and greys give way to brighter colours, of which a clear blue and bright red begin to play a dominant role. In one of Steen’s rare dated works, Village Wedding (1653, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam), villagers have crowded into the courtyard of a country inn as the bridegroom runs down the steps to greet his demure, elegantly dressed bride, while village musicians create a cacophony of sound to the left. Jan Steen painted only a few portraits, yet they are inventive and unconventional, such as The Leiden Baker Arend Oostwaert and His Wife (1658, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) or The Poultry Yard (1660, Mauritshius, The Hague).

In 1654, Jan Steen’s father rented a brewery for his son in Delft. For a while Steen combined his work as a brewer with that as a painter but the enterprise was unsuccessful, partly because of adverse economic conditions produced by the first Anglo-Dutch War and partly because of the gunpowder explosion that destroyed the greater part of Delft in 1654. It was at this time that Delft painters such as Frans van Mieris and Pieter de Hooch began to influence Steen’s increasing tendency towards elegant interiors, with fewer figures, in which a clear light defines sumptuous fabrics or details of the fine furnishings. Examples include Easy Come, Easy Go (1661, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam) in which Steen illustrated a well-known proverb possibly intended to be a moralizing warning on the dangers of profligacy. A young man, traditionally thought to be Steen himself, sits in an opulent interior while an old crone and a beautiful young woman, characters that are typical of Steen, lavishly serve him with wine and oysters. Behind them a painting of the naked figure of Fortune, standing on a die, alludes to the instability that such fleeting pleasures bring. The dangers of over-indulgence were a recurring theme throughout Steen’s career and he showed an extraordinary ability for inventing new, highly entertaining compositions, as varied as Wine is a Mocker (Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena) or The Effects of Intemperance (c. 1662-1663, National Gallery, London).