Jan Steen
The storyteller of chaos and festivity.
Jan Steen painted rowdy households and celebrations in Holland. The expression “a Jan Steen household” still means a messy home.
Jan Steen was born around 1626 in Leiden. The family was Catholic and his father was a brewer. He enrolled at the University of Leiden in 1646 but became a painter. According to early sources he studied with several masters, among them the landscape painter Jan van Goyen in The Hague. In 1649 he married van Goyen's daughter Margriet.
Steen found it hard to live from painting alone. For a time he leased a brewery in Delft and later received a licence to run an inn in Leiden. He lived in several towns, including The Hague, Delft, Haarlem and Leiden. He was a very prolific painter, and several hundred paintings are attributed to him.
He is best known for his rowdy and humorous pictures of everyday life. In The Merry Family of 1668 in the Rijksmuseum the adults sing and drink while the children smoke pipes and copy them. A Dutch proverb, “as the old sing, so pipe the young”, is written on a sheet of paper in the picture. He also painted The Feast of Saint Nicholas, in which the children receive presents and a boy cries over his birch switch, and several pictures of a doctor's visit to a lovesick girl. He often included himself as a grinning figure in the picture.
Behind the humour there is often a moral. The pictures warn against drunkenness, wastefulness and bad parenting, but with a twinkle in the eye. Steen was a skilled painter with a fine feeling for colour and for facial expression. He also painted biblical and historical scenes. After Margriet's death he remarried in 1673. He died in Leiden in 1679.
The image of Steen as a merry drinker himself comes partly from later biographers and is probably exaggerated. Even so, his pictures have left their mark on the language: in Dutch a messy home is still called “a Jan Steen household”.