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Died on 03 February 1679: Wijbrant
Jan Havickszoon Steen, Dutch painter born in 1626. —
Son-in-law of Jan
van Goyen [13 Jan 1596 – 27 Apr 1656]. Studied under Adriaen
van Ostade[bap. 10 Dec 1610 – 27 Apr 1685].
— Steen is especially noted for genre scenes. He was born in Leiden
and educated at the University of Leiden. He is believed to have studied
painting first in Utrecht with the German artist Nicolaus Knupfer, then
in The Hague with the Dutch artist Jan van Goyen, whose daughter he married
in 1649. Steen lived at The Hague until 1654, when he moved to Delft and,
according to tradition, adopted his father's occupation of brewer. Subsequently
he returned to Leiden, where he opened a tavern in 1672. Steen was a prolific
painter, particularly of lively tavern scenes and of children, although
he painted landscapes, portraits, and religious works as well. Among his
best-known paintings are The Cat Family (1660), Young Woman
at Her Toilette (1663), Wedding (1667), and The Surprise
(1675).
— Much of Jan Steen's career took place in his native Leiden, where
he enrolled in the university as a literature student in 1646 and joined
the newly founded Guild of Saint Luke in 1648. In October 1649 he married
Margaretha van Goyen [1630-1669], the daughter of the painter Jan van Goyen.
After Margaretha's death, Steen married Maria van Egmont in 1673. Steen
worked in The Hague from 1649 to 1654; lived in Delft for two years; spent
the years from 1656 to 1660 in Warmond; 1661 to 1669 in Haarlem; and finally
in 1670 settled again in his native Leiden, where he remained until his
death. Contemporary sources are silent about his artistic training. However,
his eighteenth-century biographers Arnold Houbraken and Jacob Campo Wyerman
place him in the studios of Nicolas Knöpfer in Utrecht, Adriaen van
Ostade in Haarlem, and with Jan van Goyen in The Hague. While some of these
supposed influences are more difficult to discern in his work, the impact
of Isaac van Ostade and of the Rembrandt student Jacob de West, both from
The Hague, and of the Utrecht painter Joost Cornelisz. Droochsloot, can
also be demonstrated. Most of these artists are known primarily for their
genre scenes, and with the exception of a small number of early landscapes,
it is this subject matter that would occupy Steen throughout his career.
However, in addition to a variety of genre types, including outdoor gatherings,
tavern scenes, intimate interiors, riotous scenes of domestic upheaval,
he painted serious biblical and mythological subjects. Steen developed into
a versatile painter, able to work in both the broadly brushed style characteristic
of the Haarlem school and the refined technique popularized by the Leiden
fiinschilder. |
— Steen was born in Leiden, the son of a brewer. Educated at a Latin
school, he enrolled in 1646 at Leiden university, although he was never
to actually graduate. Little is known for certain about Steen's apprenticeship
as a painter. Early eighteenth-century biographers of artists record that
he was taught by various painters: Nicolaus Knupfer, Adriaen van Ostade
as well as landscape painter Jan van Goyen, whose daughter he married in
1649. One year earlier he had registered as a master painter with the Leiden
guild of artists, indicating that his apprenticeship was now over.
Steen became especially well-known for his
genre paintings with fun-loving, cheerful groups of people. He also painted
various portraits (for example Baker Oostwaert) as well as biblical
and mythological scenes. Because of his frequent changes of address Steen
came into contact with many other artists over the years. Often, he considered
it a challenge to try and match or surpass their skills, regularly changing
his manner of painting. Steen did not earn a fortune from painting. So to
augment his income he ran a brewery in Delft for a few years and (in 1672)
opened a tavern in his own home.
In biographies Jan Steen is often portrayed
as a philanderer who led a rather chaotic life. But this is probably based
on the characters in his paintings, and not on information about the painter's
life. In fact he is known to have been a respected member of the Leiden
artists guild, in which he held various functions. As a painter he produced
an enormous amount of work. Whether he had any students is not known: certainly
he had two sons who painted, and his work was widely imitated. Jan Steen's
closest seventeenth-century follower was Richard Brakenburgh.
— Steen is best known for his humorous genre scenes, warm hearted and
animated works in which he treats life as a vast comedy of manners. In Holland
he ranks next to Rembrandt,
Vermeer,
and Hals
in popularity and a 'Jan Steen household' has become an epithet for an untidy
house. But Steen, one of the most prolific Dutch artists, has many other
faces. He painted portraits, historical, mythological, and religious subjects
(he was a Catholic), and the animals, birds, and still-lifes in his pictures
rival those by any specialist contemporaries. As a painter of children he
was unsurpassed. Steen was born in Leiden and is said to have studied with
Adriaen
van Ostade in Haarlem and Jan
van Goyen (who became his father-in-law) in The Hague. He worked in
various towns - Leiden, The Hague, Delft, Warmond, and Haarlem - and in
1672 he opened a tavern in Leiden. His father had been a brewer, and in
the popular imagination Steen was a drunken profligate, but there is nothing
in the known facts to justify this reputation. Many of his pictures represent
taverns and festive gatherings, but they often feature moralizing allusions,
and he also painted scenes of impeccable genteelness. Apart from his versatility,
richness of characterization, and inventiveness in composition, Steen is
remarkable also for his skill as a colorist, his handling of salmon-red,
rose, pale yellow, and blue-green being highly distinctive. He had no recorded
students, but his work was widely imitated.
— LINKS
— Self
Portrait (1670, 73x62cm) _ This well-dressed man eyes the viewer with
a serious and self-confident expression on his face. He is portrayed from
the waist up, standing in front of a balustrade, his arms resting lightly
on a chair. Behind him is a red curtain with a large tassel. Beside it are
the contours of a twilight landscape. This is Jan Steen's only serious self-portrait.
He regularly depicted himself in his own paintings, usually in company,
in a comical role, as a drunkard, a victim of deception or, as in The
Merry Family, playing the bagpipes.
This self portrait of Jan Steen was restored
in 1996. Steen's head was initially surrounded by a murky brown background
which blended into a dark landscape to the right. Restoration revealed that
the background was an overpainting added at a later date, concealing a magnificent,
bright red curtain. A tree was also discovered in the landscape. Once the
brown layer and the yellowed varnish had been removed, the painting revealed
its vivid colors, rivalling those of Steen's other work.
While painting this self portrait, Jan Steen
made several changes (‘pentimenti’) of his own. He altered the
composition as he went along. For example, Steen's back was initially broader
and there was once a wall (or window frame) between his face and the landscape.
Infrared reflectography reveals that the jabot around Steen's neck has been
altered several times. Also Steen had initially depicted himself as he had
in other paintings: smiling broadly.
— Interior
of an Inn with an Old Man, the Landlady and Two Men Playing Backgammon
aka Two Kinds of Games (63x70cm) _ A group of men are having fun
in a tavern. A young man is drinking beer, draining his tankard, while a
couple of others are playing backgammon. Like cards, this popular game was
associated with idleness and folly. On the left, another game is being played:
an old man tries to pull a young woman (the landlady) onto his lap. The
woman resists him half-heartedly. Her red stockings, however, suggest that
she would not have been all that worried about her morals: red stockings
often indicated the woman was a prostitute. Taverns were sometimes disguised
brothels and this place certainly has a rather dubious air. The lute on
the wall, the dog, the pipe on the firepan (the glowing coals representing
the fiery passion of love), and the mussel and eggshells on the ground suggest
debauchery, lust and idleness.
— Children
Teaching a Cat to Dance aka The Dancing Lesson (1668, 69x59cm)
_ Four children are playing with a cat, making it dance. At the center,
a young boy is holding the cat by its front paws while the girl plays a
flute and the other two children watch laughing. The cat screeches, the
dog barks and the old man looks out of the window. The scene is mainly painted
in beige and brown tones. Only the girl is wearing brightly colored clothes:
the blue of her dress is particularly bright and striking. This painting
is a 'typical Jan Steen': an amusing scene in a domestic setting with a
sexual undertone. Although the scene seems innocent enough, a contemporary
of Steen would have sensed the erotic undercurrent in the painting immediately.
In that time, the cat and the dog represented lust and lechery. The children
are giving the cat a pipe, lifting its tail and dancing. This was a period
in which dancing was considered improper, an invitation to sin. Here the
cat is dancing 'to the pipes' of the children. Other details refer equally
to love and sex: the bed in the background and musical instruments such
as the flute and the lute (on the wall). The spaniel appears in other paintings
by Steen, as does the lute on the wall, the pewter jug and the saucepan
on the ground.
— Leiden
Baker Arend Oostwaert and His Wife Catharina Keyzerswaert (1658, 38x32cm)
_ A baker dressed in his work clothes steps outside holding freshly made
bread on a breadboard. Arranged in full view are a variety of shining loaves
and rolls; against the wall is a square dovecote. A woman holds up a big
toasted biscuit while above her hang large pretzels. On the right a boy
blows a horn: a signal to the public that the new bread was ready. The small
rolls on the fence appear to have come out of his horn - an amusing touch.
The scene looks like a genre piece - a picture of a baker at his work. However,
it is not just any baker; it is a portrait of Arend Oostwaert of Leiden
and his wife. This type of combination of genre piece and portrait is a
common feature of Steen's work.
The baker and his wife were married in 1657:
they probably commissioned the portrait to mark the occasion. This could
explain why Jan Steen added festoons of flowers and vine leaves to the front
of the house: traditionally these represented marital fidelity. The inscription
notes that the boy was modeled on a son of Jan Steen's, probably the 7-year-old
Thaddeus.
The baker is shown in his work clothes, wearing
a cap and open shirt. He is depicted with swift brushstrokes. His wife is
more carefully painted - she is wearing neater clothes, a respectable black
and white. Originally she wore a more colorful blouse: the red tones can
be seen through the white. Steen also altered the baker's shirt with a pentimento:
originally it was not so open. These changes can now be seen because the
top layer of paint has become transparent in the course of time.
— Prince's
Day (1665, 46x62cm) _ “To
the health of the Nassau line, in one hand a rapier, in the other hand the
glass.” This rhyme, with a little effort and a magnifying
glass, can be read on the piece of paper on the floor against the table
leg. The inscription and the work's title Prince's Day explains
the occasion behind this painting: the tenth birthday of Prince William
III [14 Nov 1650 – 19 Mar 1702] of the house of Orange-Nassau. This
feast was not celebrated by everybody because, at the time, the Republic
was divided between those for and against the prince. Jan Steen painted
this tavern scene five years after the event.
The writing on the note refers to the man
who is kneeling with the rapier and raising his glass in a toast for the
prince. While he drinks he looks towards the painting hanging above the
bedstead: a portrait of the young Prince of Orange. His white apron identifies
him as the tavern's landlord. Prince's Day contains still more
references to the landlord's support for the House of Orange: the portrait
of the prince is hanging from an orange ribbon and a branch with orange
apples is draped over the bell frame. The color also appears in the orange
in the foreground and the feathers in the hat lying on the bench.
Only the group at the center of the painting
appears to respond to the landlord's toast. The man who is standing is raising
his glass, an older woman is screaming (or laughing?), gesticulating, while
the woman in the foreground looks on disdainfully. The other customers continue
doing what they were doing. The two men on the right are shaking hands,
sealing a bargain or a bet. On the left is a typical tableau: a man is reading
from the newspaper. Two other men are listening. This situation was not
unusual in the seventeenth century; newspapers were often read and discussed
in the taverns by several people at the same time.
In Jan Steen's day, taverns were known as
places where (too) much drinking and dissipated behavior took place. Taverns
might even be brothels in disguise. Several elements seem to refer to this
in this painting: on the left a ladder leads up to a balcony over which
a man's trousers are hanging, and the people underneath the ladder are flirting
heavily. The company in this tavern is somewhat shabbily dressed; the guests
obviously do not belong to the higher classes. The prince was mainly supported
by the 'common folk'. It is not precisely clear what Steen intended by this
painting. Did he simply want to portray the prince's supporters in the tavern,
or has he depicted the prince's followers as faintly ridiculous?
A clue to the intention behind this painting
can perhaps be found in the text on the bell frame: “Salus
patriae suprema lex esto”. This was the motto of the States
party-faction that opposed the Orangists. It was an admonition against the
power of the stadholders who, the States Party claimed, were becoming too
much like kings. The interests of the country should be above those of the
king. The Latin motto was based on a Greek quote from Plato. This was the
motto of the State Party which opposed to the prince. The painting was made
during the 'stadholderless' period. This unique political situation apparently
provided Prince's Day with additional political significance. It
is not known whether or not Steen supported the State Party. It could be
that the person who commissioned the painting was a supporter of this party.
Whatever the case, the meaning behind this painting remains a mystery.
The characters in the central group are linked
together by gestures and looks. The gestures are somewhat exaggerated and
seem 'frozen', as if in a film still. In this way Steen gives the story
additional emphasis. Apart from being an exciting story-teller, Steen was
also a skilled painter. The materials in the foreground are beautifully
painted. Prince's Day, despite of the apparent chaos, also follows
a very strict composition. The central group immediately attracts attention
due to the light shining on it. These characters are depicted slightly larger
and with more color. The group falls within the lines of a triangle formed
by the bell frame, the copper kettle and the saucepan.
Steen has used himself as the model for the
man standing laughing. The round cheeks and long hair are recognisable from
the self portrait of 1670. Jan Steen often put himself and members of his
family in his paintings. The sleeping dog can also be found in other paintings
by the painter. Placing himself in the composition by no means meant that
he identified himself with the character.
— The
Feast of Saint Nicholas (1666, 82x70cm) _ Steen painted at least six
pictures of the Feast of Saint Nicholas, the festival traditionally dedicated
to Dutch children. On the eve of 05 December, Saint Nicholas comes to the
Netherlands from Spain to leave appropriate gifts in the shoes of children.
The good ones receive cakes, sweets, and toys; the naughty ones get canes
and coals. A complicated play of diagonals helps bind the family of ten
together — from the heap of special pastries to the man pointing to
the chimney on the right, where Saint Nicholas made his entry, and from
the carved table covered with sweets up to the girl holding the shoe with
the distressing birch-rod. Figures which lean in one direction are balanced
by those leaning in the other; foreground and background, right and left
are held together by gestures, glances, and expressions which give the painting
familial as well as pictorial tautness. The smiling boy who points to the
shoe makes the onlooker part of this family scene by smiling directly out
at him or her. The coloristic effect is brilliant, and does not lack unification
or become too diffuse, as is sometimes the case in Steen's work.
A family is celebrating Saint Nicholas' Day.
The children have just received their presents. The little girl is rather
spoilt: she has a doll and a bucket full of sweets and toys. The boy crying,
left, found the cane in his shoe. The older girl holds the shoe up triumphantly
and another youngster points to it and laughs at the boy. But in the background,
Grandma nods reassuringly to the unfortunate lad. Perhaps she has a present
for him, hidden behind the curtain.
A boy holding a child points out the chimney
to his brother: it is through here that St Nicholas brought his gifts. His
other brother is already singing a St Nicholas song thanking the saint.
In the foreground is a basket of all kinds of traditional St Nicholas Eve
sweetmeats: gingerbread, honey cake, nuts, waffles and apples from the tree.
The large ginger cake is a matchmaker or 'hylickmaker'. A Hylickmaker is
a kind of large cake decorated with candied peel and pieces of orange. Hylick
means marriage. It was therefore an ideal gift for a person who was about
to propose. This type of cake was also eaten on St Nicholas day, because
of the saint's association with marriage. According to legend, he gave dowries
to three poor young women to help them find husbands. The word 'heilig'
(holy) in one of the saint's names - 'goedheiligman' - may even be a corruption
of the term hylick, referring to St Nicholas as the refuge of unmarried
young women. This section of the painting is a still life in itself, a picture
within a picture.
More delicacies are depicted on the right.
The apple and coin refer to the old tradition of hiding coins in apples
and giving these to friends as presents. Leaning against the table is a
gleaming duivekater. Duivekater A 'duivekater' is a diamond-shaped loaf
baked for festive occasions. There are several theories about the name,
but no one really knows what the origins are. It may have something to do
with the devil in the shape of a tom cat. On the other hand, it may be derived
from the expression 'deux fois quatre' (pronounced de-fwa-katr), French
for 'twice four' - a large loaf weighing double the normal weight of a loaf
costing four doits: a 'quatre fois'. Another explanation is that the loaf
is named after a baker called Deuvekater who lived in Leiden around 1450
- although of course the man might also have acquired his name from the
product he sold! Duivekaters are featured in a number of 17th-century paintings,
including a number by Jan Steen. Steen's portrait of the Leiden baker also
contains a duivekater.
The child near the chimney is holding a delicacy
that is still eaten around 5 December: a gingerbread man in the shape of
St Nicholas. In the seventeenth century, the baking of St Nicholas figures
was banned in many Dutch cities. In Utrecht, for example, an ordinance passed
in 1655 forbade 'the baking of likenesses in bread or cake'. Symbolisations
of (Catholic) saints for Catholic festivals were frowned on by the Protestant
authorities.
In 1657 the city of Dordrecht banned the actual
St Nicholas festival. The Reformed Church considered the celebration a 'residue
of popery', 'encouraging superstition ... and idolatry'. However, these
measures had little effect. Himself a Catholic, Jan Steen nevertheless went
ahead and painted this cheerful family festival. Perhaps this was Steen's
- rather daring - response to the Protestant Church's standpoint. The girl's
present indicates that this was indeed a Catholic family: it is a model
St John, a doll representing John the Baptist. This saint was supposed to
protect children against disease.
Cheerful people in a domestic setting: a typical
Jan Steen scene. From the numerous paintings with titles such as The
Merry Family, depicting chaotic and disorderly homes, a new saying
emerged, a 'Jan Steen houseld'. Popular festivals such as St Nicholas, Twelfth
Night and Prince's Day (to celebrate the Prince of Orange's birthday) were
for Steen an ideal opportunity to paint happy people. Other emotions also
come into play at a St Nicholas feast: surprise and awe, joy and sadness,
secrecy, mockery and excitement. Steen portrays these masterfully in this
painting and another canvas on the same theme in the Museum Boijmans Van
Beuningen collection in Rotterdam.
In the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen version
most of the figures have the same role and position: the mother with her
arms extended, the spoilt girl, the boy crying and the younger brother with
the kolf stick Kolf Kolf is a sport in which a ball is struck with a kolf
stick (a cross between a golf club and a hockey stick). The object is to
hit the poles on the kolf pitch. Kolf was played both on land and on ice.
For centuries, from the Middle Ages on, it was as popular in the Low Countries
as football is today. West Friesland is the only place in which kolf is
still played. However, the home provides quite a different spectacle. It
shows that, like other artists, Steen did not always try to provide an accurate
portrayal of a real scene. He probably based his paintings on previous sketches
of characters and situations that he combined in various ways in a composition.
It has often been suggested that Steen used
his own family as models for his paintings. Steen had four children in all.
When he painted the St Nicholas Feast there were still only three,
all older than seven. The younger children in this work must therefore have
been 'borrowed' from other parents. He may have drawn them from sketches,
or he may have invented them, 'from the spirit', as it was termed in the
seventeenth century.
It was not only Steen who reused characters
in particular poses in later paintings. His faithful follower Richard Brakenburgh
employed several poses and gestures from Steen's St Nicholas Feast
in a work painted in 1685 on the same theme. Once again we see the spoilt
girl, the boy crying, the mother with arms extended and the grandmother
gesturing.
Steen was a true storyteller: the focus is
invariably on the story. He paid particular attention to the portrayal of
relationships between people and their emotions. Gestures and glances link
the characters in an oval within which the main events take place. This
composition ensures that the viewer's attention is directed towards the
centre of the painting, where the story takes place.
— The
Merry Family (1668, 110x141cm) _ A happy family around the table. Young
and old, all are enjoying themselves enormously: the mother and grandmother
are singing a song, two sons are playing music while their brothers and
a sister smoke a pipe. The father has stopped playing his violin and exuberantly
raises his glass. His example is followed by the children in the foreground,
who are also drinking wine. This is one of Steen's most famous paintings.
Despite the merriness, this is not the cosy
family party it seems. The happy, chaotic 'Jan Steen household' scenes almost
always contain a moral: admonishments against undisciplined behavior and
excess. This painting also contains a more specific message which can be
read in the inscription on the mantelpiece to the right. 'Soo d'Oude Songen,
Soo Pypen de Jonge': children do what their parents do, even when they are
set a bad example, as is here. The children are exuberant and restless and
even the youngest are smoking and drinking. The painter is warning against
the consequences of a bad upbringing.
Steen has depicted the proverb figuratively,
but also literally: the adults are singing and the children are piping:
playing a flute or smoking a pipe. In this way Steen focused on the moral
behind the picture. Paintings with subjects taken from everyday life are
called genre paintings. These were often meant to teach a lesson. Painters
like Steen emphasised their message while others painted attractive tableau
with a concealed moral. And sometimes a domestic scene was nothing more
than an attractive painting to decorate a wall.
The people in this jolly family are full of
life, with realistic gestures and facial expressions. Some, like the singing
father and grandmother, have such comical faces, they could almost to be
caricatures. The baby with its round, rosy cheeks appears to be raising
its spoon to beat time for its flute-playing brother. The bagpipe player
is puffing his cheeks out too. Some historians believe that Steen used himself
as the model for this character. The man does indeed resemble the self portrait
by Steen, nevertheless, it remains uncertain.
A number of objects on this painting appear
in other works by Steen. The large hams on the table, the frying pan on
the floor, the spaniel and a similar wooden bench all appear in Steen's
'Prince's Day'. The glass being raised in both works is a römer: a seventeenth-century
glass with prunts on the stem. Perhaps these objects belonged to Steen's
own household, in which case they would have been near to hand. Steen obviously
enjoyed painting the materials convincingly and beautifully.
Steen's careful handling of texture is visible
in the soft shine of the girls' clothes in the foreground and the fall of
the light on the folds of the tablecloth. The metal dish on the floor reflects
the light from the window. A delightful detail is the broken eggshells lying
on the floor. Presumably, this is not there by accident. In paintings like
this, empty eggshells often refer to the fragility and 'emptiness' of a
life that only consists of drinking, smoking and partying.
— The
Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1671, 135x173cm) _ In the open air, just outside
a city gate, a dramatic event is taking place. At the center stands an executioner
about to kill a woman. A king, with his crown fallen to one side, leans
on his stick in despair. In the upper right, in the gateway, a woman is
folding her hands, beseeching or praying, while in the lower left a cupid-like
Cupid-like boy is walking away crying and bystanders talk with frantic gestures
or look at the woman at the center full of disgust.
Here Steen has convincingly depicted a story
from Classical mythology: the sacrifice of Iphigenia. The king is Agamemnon,
King of Mycenae in Greece. He has had to offer his daughter as a sacrifice
to the goddess Artemis. What led to this drama was Agamemnon's determination
to lay siege to the city of Troy. Yet every time he tried to embark his
fleet, a calm descended. A soothsayer revealed that he had angered the goddess
Artemis and that the king could only win back her favor by making a sacrifice
to her: his daughter Iphigenia. After much hesitation and under pressure
from his army, the king finally agreed.
The painter has pictured the moment just before
Iphigenia is to be sacrificed. The executioner is about to kill her, the
knife shines in his hand and he is looking cruelly at his victim. Miraculously
however, the king's daughter escapes from her gruesome death at the last
moment. The goddess Artemis is present at the event and intervenes: without
anyone noticing, she replaces Iphigenia with a deer. And so the deer is
sacrificed and the king's daughter is saved. Artemis, identifiable by her
crescent moon, is in the upper left of the painting, between two columns;
the deer is walking unsuspectingly near the sacrificial altar.
Steen has paid particular attention to the
rendering of texture on a few figures in the foreground. The king's clothes
display a wonderful contrast between the hard, shining metal and the soft
gleam of his mantle and his fleshy bare knee. The kneeling woman has also
been depicted with great care. The shine of her hair, silk clothes and the
fall of the light on the folds are beautifully rendered. We can easily see
that Steen moved her right foot during painting. The bare feet have become
a little dirty from walking, a pleasant realistic detail. However, the light
from the wood fire that shines around her turned head gives this woman a
mysterious air.
Jan Steen is mainly known for his genre paintings
of everyday scenes. However, he also painted subjects from history, the
Bible or, as here, classical mythology. There were many rules concerning
the painting of history scenes in the seventeenth century. Later, in 1707,
these rules were recorded by the painter Gerard Lairesse in his Schilderboeck.
For instance, people had to be depicted as beautiful and exalted, nude or
dressed in the clothes of the day. There were also guidelines for attitudes
and gestures, the use of color and composition. Selene
and Endymion (1671) is an example of how Lairesse had applied his
own precepts.
Steen did not keep strictly to the rules of
history painting. He followed his own ideas and depicted the subject in
a less exalted way than was usual. Like his genre paintings, this scene
is a little chaotic. To make the story recognisable for his contemporaries,
he has not dressed all the people in 'Iphegenia' in classical Greek costumes,
but seventeenth-century, Dutch clothes. Most of the faces also look quite
Dutch. Only the group on the right have something exotic about them due
to the king's Roman cuirass and the head-dresses of the men around him:
the turban, the laurel wreath, a kind of bishop's miter and a variation
on a Roman helmet.
— The
Sick Woman (1665, 76x64cm) _ A young woman leans over weakly in her
chair, her head resting on a cushion on the table. The doctor is taking
her pulse. What is the young lady suffering from? Probably she is not ill,
just hopelessly in love. She is 'lovesick', her heart is broken. Steen depicted
her with blushing cheeks and a smile on her lips. Contemporaries of Steen
would immediately have seen that this was not a real emergency. The 'doctor'
is wearing clothes which were by then old-fashioned. Doctors in garments
such as these were confined to the stage, where playwrights made fun of
incompetent quacks.
To the seventeenth-century audience it was
obvious that this was all about love. Jan Steen offers all kinds of clues.
The chamberpot and candle were in those days symbols of lust. And beside
the bedstead hangs a lute, often employed in paintings to symbolise love,
or immorality. In the foreground, on the right is a footwarmer with a brazier.
As in other seventeenth-century paintings, the glow of the coal stands perhaps
for the fire of love: the woman is devoured by the flames of passion!
The brazier serves a practical purpose too.
A blue ribbon from the woman's dress is smouldering in the fire. Popular
superstition held that it's pungent aroma would stop women fainting. To
determine whether a person was 'lovesick' it was necessary to count the
heartbeat, or to take the pulse. The heartbeat was thought to reflect the
patient's emotional state: if the object of infatuation appeared, or was
simply mentioned, the heart would beat faster.
On the footwarmer is a flask, probably filled
with urine. Once it was slightly heated the doctor would study its contents.
Examining urine - 'uroscopy' - was a supposedly tried and tested method
of determining whether a woman was pregnant. It is shown in the The
Anaemic Lady (1670, 70x65cm) by van Hoogstraten [02 Aug 1627 –
19 Nov 1668]. In Jan Steen's day there was considerable criticism of the
quacksalvers who still practiced this outmoded technique. Uroscopists were
portrayed in seventeenth-century paintings and plays to show up charlatan
doctors and hypochondriacs. It is ironic that nowadays a common and reliable
home pregnancy
test detects, not by eyesight but chemically, the presence of human
chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) in a woman's urine.
Steen painted the sick woman and the doctor
with considerable attention to detail. He portrayed the faces with a confidant
touch, the faint woman and the brilliant shine of the cloth. For the figures,
Steen used good paints with expensive pigments, such as the costly lapis
lazuli for the slipper and the blue ribbon. Yet other parts of the painting
are hardly developed at all, such as the rather coarsely painted wall behind
the bed. Steen painted the bedstead with a poor quality paint that has lost
much of its color over the years. Differences in quality are not unusual
in paintings by Steen.
The 'doctor' in this painting is wearing a
beret and a tightly fitting jacket with a high collar and a small, pleated
ruff. This had been fashionable about 1560-1570, as in the portrait of Sir
Thomas Gresham (1565) by A.
Mor. When Steen painted his Sick Woman about a century later,
it was hopelessly out-dated and only fit for caricatures. What would a serious
doctor have worn in Jan Steen's day? Rembrandt
painted a portrait of the Jewish doctor Ephraim
Bueno in 1647. He is wearing a high hat and wide jacket with a
broad, flat collar.
Lovesickness aroused considerable interest
in the second half of the seventeenth century, not least among serious investigators.
At the universities of Leiden and Utrecht as many as seventeen dissertations
were submitted on the subject! Although lovesickness claimed victims among
men as well as women, in paintings it was usually female patients who were
shown, rather than male. Steen is known to have painted almost fifty doctor's
visits, for example The
Lovesick Maiden (1660, 86x99cm). In The
Lovesick Woman (1660), Steen emphasized the message even further
with a rather exaggeratedly droll doctor, a cupid statue above the doorway
and the inscription, 'No medicine can help, it's only lovesickness'.
— Woman
at her Toilet (1665, 37x27cm) _ A young woman is sitting on the edge
of her bed and removing a stocking. Marks left by the stocking are visible
on her legs. There's a chamber pot on the floor and a dog lies sleeping
on the cushion. It seems quite an innocent scene perhaps, but for an seventeenth-century
audience the erotic references in the painting would have been immediately
obvious.
Red stockings, true love? The average contemporary
of Jan Steen would have seen straight away that this was not the everyday
action of an innocent young woman. 'Kous', the Dutch for stocking, could
also mean the female genitals or a (loose) woman. Expressions such as 'she's
darning her stockings' were frequently used to refer to the sexual act.
In that period, a woman with red stockings was a prostitute. The half-filled
chamber pot on the floor also refers to 'loose' women: a 'piskous' was another
word for slut. And the message was reinforced by the discarded slippers,
the dog and the candlestick on the chair: here these are all symbols of
lust.
Steen painted other picture in which the stocking
plays the same role. The Woman at her Toilet in the Buckingham
Palace collection is similar to this painting (in the Rijksmuseum), although
here the scene is glimpsed through a window. Seventeenth-century prints
also refer to the dubious message of a woman (or a man!) removing or putting
on their stockings. In a print from a songbook a woman ridicules a man pulling
on a stocking. The large, open bed and the raucous text of the accompanying
song leave little doubt as to the meaning of the illustration.
For many years the scene was far less 'licentious'
than Steen had intended: part of the work had been painted over. The woman's
skirt was lengthened, so that her legs were covered, and the chamber pot
was turned into a vase.
In his paintings, Steen often commented on
the licentious behavior of his characters. Sometimes the criticism is obvious.
Here the message is less direct. Years after it was completed, it no longer
struck the viewer as obvious what it was that Steen was ridiculing. Perhaps
that is why someone decided to blot out the worst of the nudity and the
'banal' chamber pot with a new layer of paint. It was only in the 1960s,
when the painting was cleaned, that restorers were surprised to find an
uncensored version.
The brown and white spotted dog is sleeping
peacefully on its mistress's cushion. This dog appears in many of Jan Steen's
paintings. Was it perhaps his pet? Sometimes the animal is asleep in the
background, as here and in Prince's Day, or just staring at something
on the floor, in The Marriage Contract. Occasionally the
animal has an active role, for example, barking ferociously at a cat in
The Dancing Lesson. Other artists have also featured the spaniel,
or 'kooikershond'. It was apparently a popular breed in the seventeenth
century. Dogs in seventeenth-century art have various connotations, depending
on the context. In this immoral setting the dog probably refers to lust.
Van Ostade has a similar dog in
Peasants in an Interior (1661), and van de Velde another one
in A
Couple with Two Children and a Nursemaid in a Landscape (1667).
In contrast to the many busy, cheerful Steen
households, the Woman at her Toilet is a quiet, unassuming scene.
The colors are harmonious: dark brown and deep, dark green with silver-grey,
white, ochre and red accents. The artist paid particular attention to the
texture. With great care he painted the various materials: the dark-green
velvet of the curtains, the hair of the dog and the dull shine of the silver-grey
silk jacket. The shiny chamber pot is a minor masterpiece: the metal reflects
much of the room. And the impression of the stockings on the woman's leg
and her black, curly hair are lifelike.
–- The
Marriage of Tobias and Sarah aka The Marriage Contract (1673,
104x128cm; 919k1131pix, 103kb _ .ZOOM
to 1840x2264pix, 607kb _ .ZOOM+
to 3680x4528pix, 2435kb)
—(070202) |
Rockwell, a scholarship winner of the Art
Students League, received his first free-lance assignment from Condé Nast
at 17 years of age and thereafter provided illustrations for various magazines.
In 1916 he sold his first cover to The Saturday Evening Post, for
which in the next 47 years he illustrated a total of 317 magazine covers.
From 1926 to 1976 Rockwell also illustrated the official Boy Scout Calendar.
During World War II, posters of his paintings portraying the “Four Freedoms”
were reproduced and distributed by the Office of War Information. Rockwell
was a careful craftsman with an ability to represent detail realistically.
The subjects of most of his illustrations are taken from everyday family
and small-town life and are often treated with a touch of humour. Though
loved by the public, Rockwell's work was dismissed by most pompous critics
as lacking artistic merit and authentic social observation.
