CHILDREN OF THE GOLDEN AGE

JAN STEEN AND THE PORTRAYAL! OF YOUTH

SEBASTIAN ARYANA UNIVERSITY OF

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CHILDREN OF THE GOLDEN AGE

JAN STEEN AND THE PORTRAYAL OF YOUTH

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SEBASTIAN ARYANA

UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

2015

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE ...... i

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2. HISTORICITY ...... 7

3. ARTISTIC DIALOGUE ...... 15

4. CHILDREN IN ART ...... 19

5. COMIC TRADITION ...... 25

6. LIFE AND TRAINING OF JAN STEEN ...... 35

7. THE PUZZLE OF MOLENAER ...... 40

8. DIFFERENCES IN CHILDREN ...... 45

9. DISTORTED REALITIES ...... 51

10. CONCLUSION ...... 56

CATALOGUE ...... 66

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 86 PREFACE

Every research begins with a spark of imagination. For me, it was ’s Little

Street in . It was the sheer quietness of the picture, the stillness of the moment, the randomness of the scene, and the simplicity of the whole thing. Yet, there is enough in the picture to have fed scholarly research for decades, to fill pages of books, and to gather huge crowds in front of it at the in Amsterdam. During the last year of my undergraduate studies at the University of Washington, the seemingly realism of the seventeen-century Dutch paintings made me curious. But I had to look for my own niche in the field of Dutch , which ranges from portraiture to comics to landscape and seascape. The likes of Vermeer and are over-studied, and the vastness of literature available on them, makes the challenge less appealing. It was in 2010 when I began to look at the “comical” pictures of seventeenth-century Dutch art to find a topic to write my undergraduate research paper on. That paper I submitted to my influential professor Dr. Jolynn Edwards, under the title of The Theater of Sins and Laughter. Two years later, after having taken more Art History classes as an un-matriculated student at the

University of Washington in Seattle, I summited a revised version under the new title of

Mysteries of Fools to the University of Amsterdam as part of my application for the Masters of Arts degree in Dutch seventeenth-century art history. During my stay in Amsterdam, I centered my focus on Jan Steen, the prominent name in Dutch comics, and further on refined my research question to the children in his paintings. This thesis is a study of the portrayal of children by Steen, and their possible connection to the children in the works of

Jan Miense Molenaer.

Chapter one introduces the character of Jan Steen and his fondness of humorous pictures. It then briefly points out that the children in Steen’s paintings are different from the ! i! tradition, in that they are portrayed as actual young individuals with childlike features, rather than small sized people with adult demeanors. Working in a number of different Dutch towns helped shape Steen’s painting manner, with in particular having had the greatest influence on him. Of the Haarlem painters, Molenaer and his probable influence in the way

Steen depicted children is singled out as the topic for this thesis. Chapter two discusses the historicity of the subject from the biased earliest biographers of the eighteenth century down to the modern approach of the twentieth-century art historians, and distinguishes the shortcomings of each wave of scholars throughout the centuries. The lack of scholarly interest on the particularity of children in the works of Steen, and their connection to the rather vaguely studied Molenaer, gives green lights to this research to begin.

In chapter three, the artistic dialogue that existed between the artists is discussed, indicating that using existing themes and relying on established canon, was not considered copying, and that it was a part of the process to become a professional painter. Thus, any similarities that may be found in the works of Steen and those of other masters, is not ground enough to dispute his originality and uniqueness of style. Chapter four summarizes the evolution of child portraiture in the western art from the renaissance down to the seventeenth century, when children became more expressive and were painted with a more psychological approach. Steen often used mischievous children as commentators on the misbehaved adults, thus to convey didactic messages, though children in Steen’s work are sometimes ordinary children, who are parts of a narrative genre. In order to better understand the comic form within the categories of genre, chapter five discussed in detail the history and meaning of comic painting in the seventeenth-century . This was a broad category of humorous and delightful pictures, which in accordance to contemporary norms, functioned both as entertainment and moral instructions.

! ii! Steen’s life and training are looked upon closer in chapter six. By bringing back the popular themes of previous generations and elaborating on their ideas, Steen invented new variations with heartwarming changes, which appealed to his audience. Hence the repetition of certain subjects, was the result of them being sold. The sheer diversity of his subjects raises the question of who and where influenced him the most. The development of Steen’s work seems to have been perfected in Haarlem, where he must have met Molenaer. In chapter seven, Molenaer’s shrouded-in-mystery life sets the stage for studying his influence on Steen. In a town ripe with comic tradition, Molenaer emerges as the link between Pieter

Bruegel the Elder and Steen. They both painted children who evoked laughter; yet, research reveals differences between Molenaer’s rather simple compositions and Steen’s storytelling discussion-pieces. Those differences are explored in chapters eight and nine, arguing that

Molenaer’s children are stage actors, who bring the audience into their theatrical space, rather than bringing the story of the painting out to the viewer, like Steen’s children do.

Furthermore, the nature of realism in the works of Steen and Molenaer, and how they reflected it onto the children, varies. While Molenaer’s comic realism was a random moment in time pointed out by the gestural language of children, Steen painted the disorder and the imperfections of reality, narrated by children. The thesis concludes in chapter ten, deciding that even though Steen might have received the idea of including children in his pictures from Molenaer, he drew his own unique types of children, who had new ways of telling the stories.

Sebastian Aryana

Seattle, Washington

August 2015

! iii! 1. INTRODUCTION

“If one wishes to derive honor from this, the noblest aspect of art, then one must transform oneself completely into an actor.” –Samauel van Hoogstraeten

Jan Steen’s face is one of the best recognizable in all of seventeenth-century Dutch art, second only to Rembrandt, who painted some fifty self-portraits. About three hundred and fifty paintings by Steen have survived, hundreds more are known to have existed from documents. But he only needed one self-portrait (Fig. 1) to place his image in the

Rijksmuseum’s Hall of Honor. Despite being a formal portrait, it gives the impression as though the sitter is about to burst into laughter at any moment. Steen’s power lied in his sense of humor and cheerfulness. He could turn everything into a witty subject, in such a way, that the Dutch proverb Jan Steen household, has survived to this day. The messages in his paintings are often very clear, though at times he could be ambiguous, leaving us in doubt whether it is a joke or a serious incident. Steen knew what sells. He picked the society’s issues of interest, and turned them into unique and visually striking images of life, which have captured the imagination of his audience for more than three centuries. The world he created is comical and fun, and at times Steen casts himself in it. His lightheartedness and questionable moral issues keep him just barely on the safe side, for even in biblical subjects he saw entertainment and amusement. He frequently chose moments of mockery and mankind’s foolishness. With the addition of children as disobedient and naughty, to underscore the topsy-turvy nature of the world of adults, Steen invented a unique class of genre, which defied the contemporary social norms.1

Steen was not the first Netherlandish artist to include children in paintings. Pieter

Bruegel painted children at play too, but they were represented as dwarfs rather than !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1!Mariët Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1997), 154-5.! ! 1! children. He never conceived the real nature of childhood. did it better by capturing the laughter of children, but they are mainly portraitures. Steen, on the other hand, was not a portrait painter, not in the psychological sense of individualism anyway. Steen’s children, some of whom are modeled after his own, are real children, not small people.

Steen’s child-like children, in particular in the scenes of teasing cats, were perhaps influenced by the children in the works of , Frans and Drick Hals, and Judith

Leyster. But Steen’s pictures are scenes of larger groups and more complex.2 Some of the figures in Steen’s pictures are presented as universal human types with comical features.

They do not seem to bear likeness to real individuals. Even the facial features of his own character are often altered from one picture to another. However, the children in his paintings seem to be recognizable. Sometimes they even bear resemblance to the adults in the pictures. In particular, Steen’s own children can be identified fairly easily, and it is fascinating to watch them growing up in the paintings. Nonetheless, with the exception of his own family members, who were readily available as models, Steen had a tendency to typify, instead of studying individual characteristics. This has been seen as an obstacle in his artistic development, where no major turning point is noticeable. In fact, very few styles and fashions of his day, even from Amsterdam, seem to have influenced him.3

In despite of their originality and innovations, every artist, essentially had been influenced by previous masters in some ways. Jan Steen was no exception. He seems to have been inspired by Brouwer’s inn scenes, with the aid of stock types from the repertoire of the Italian comedy and Dutch rhetoricians.4 Dutch prototypes of childhood used their entertaining character as means to draw attention to something else, such as to criticize plays of children as a time-wasting pleasure. For instance, Jan Steen’s Feast of St. Nicholas !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2!Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century, 112.! 3!Schmidt Degener, Jan Steen (London: John Lane the Bodley Head Limited, 1927), 20-21.! 4!Jakob Rosenberg, Seymour Slive and E. H. Ter Kuile, Dutch At and Architecture: 1600-1800 (Hardmonsworth: Penguin Books, cop., 1966), 133.! ! 2! provides little sense of the children’s interior thoughts or emotions. Instead, it has used children to convey a full list of didactic anecdotes and moral lessons about reward and punishment, greed, discipline, and parenting.5 Different artists took varying attitudes toward the subject of childhood. Vermeer, a father of eleven, never painted a child, while Molenaer and Steen celebrated childhood and its joys in numerous paintings. Others drew allegorical or symbolic meanings from children, for example, showing the transience of life in the act of a child blowing soap bubbles.6 Likewise, how the figures of children were depicted was subject to artistic interpretation. Paul Rubens did not paint his son as a miniature adult, but as a real boy. His vision of a child was not a shortened version of a stocky man, like so many of his contemporaries had done in depicting children of peasants. Rubens was probably influenced by the drawings of Albrecht Dürer and his studies on anatomical proportions, which show that children have distinctive physical characteristics different than a short adult.7

Steen trained in different towns, each having their own distinctive school of painting, thus he picked up from the leading artists in those towns. For example, Frans van Mieris connection can be seen in the Girl Eating Oysters. It is likely that in Haarlem Steen made contact with Frans Hals, whose art Steen has known to have collected, and one can assume that the aging artist must have left an impact upon Steen.8 If we presume that Steen during his time in Haarlem, was part of a circle of artists, then the question arises who the colleagues with whom he connected and worked with were. In the sixties in Haarlem, there was a group of artists who strongly influenced each other back and forth. However, it is difficult to make any definite conclusion, as their works vary stylistically, and they covered

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 5!Greg M. Thomas, Impressionist Children: Childhood, Family, and Modern Identity in French Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 10.! 6!Barbara Burn, Metropolitan Children (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1984), 7.! 7!Ibid., 74.! 8!Rosenberg, Slive and Ter Kuile, Dutch Art and Architecture: 1600-1800, 134.! ! 3! diverse subjects from biblical to genre and comics.9 It is here that Molenaer comes to this interconnected web of influences. It is claimed that he was apprenticed to Frans Hals.

Although it is not known for a fact, it is a claim with reasonable grounds. Molenaer’s Merry

Company shows debts to laughing figures of Hals, but does not capture the latter’s painterly brushwork. It seems as though sparked something in Molenaer as well.10 Then around 1640, Molenaer fell under ’s influence, but again failed to truly master the design of peasant scenes. These unsuccessful changes made his art to become dull and monotonous, and resulted in the decline of his and his wife’s work at the same time.11

Few artists explored as wide and diverse range of subjects as did Jan Miense

Molenaer and Jan Steen. They distinguished themselves from other Haarlem genre painters by producing pictures that were didactic, literary, funny, delightful, and ichnographically sophisticated.12 More than any of their contemporaries, and perhaps more than any Dutch painter, Molenaer and Steen made commentaries on the moral dilemmas of their society.

They addressed these issues with humor and in comic situations, often incorporating children to make the scene seem innocent and lighthearted. The question that has never been raised, is to what extent, if any, did Molenaer influence Steen in painting children. With only a few drawings attributed to these artists, the answer to this intriguing question is hidden in the paintings themselves, and in the one-by-one figural and character studies of the children in the works of Molenaer and Steen.13 With little documentation prior to 1636, the early years of Molenaer's career remain in the shadow. Therefore, again it comes down to the pictures

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9!Lyckle de Vries. Jan Steen: Prinsjesdag (Bloemendaal: H.J.W. Becht, 1992), 58.! 10!Rosenberg, Slive and Ter Kuile, Dutch At and Architecture: 1600-1800, 107.! 11!Ibid., 108.! 12!Dennis P. Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the (Raleigh, N.C.: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2002), 9.! 13!Ibid., 9.! ! 4! and their connection with the artistic environment in Haarlem, the fertile artistic town, which provided a worthy setting for Molenaer, and later for Steen.14 Molenaer has been regarded in the literature as a specialist of genre, and active in the circle of Frans Hals. Such brief descriptions, however, do not do justice to Molenaer, whose very diverse oeuvre extends into portraiture, history painting, and scenes of contemporary theater. Most importantly,

Molenaer was a major player in a Bruegel revival that occurred during the second quarter of the seventeenth century, and his comical pictures serve as a link between the Bruegel tradition and the art of Jan Steen, who was greatly influenced by Molenaer's art. However, such a relationship has not been studied enough, and more so, the connection between the children in the works of Steen and Molenaer has been largely overlooked in the literature.15

Addressing these shortcomings is not the main aim of this paper, though in order to arrive at the desired topic, the whole picture needs to be looked at. This paper seeks to narrow it down even more, to discuss the probable influence that Molenaer had on Steen’s way of depicting children. Documents, inventories, and the oeuvres of both Molenaer and

Steen have assisted in the determination of the character and the degree of the influence.

Steen’s children were likely influenced by the works of other artists, amongst them Molenaer, but he took a step further, and he portrayed them as individuals with a cultural meaning. It is reasonable to assume that the children are presented in paintings for a reason, and it has been argued that in Steen’s paintings, the child provokes commentary upon the character of the adult. However, Steen could have criticized the adult behavior by other means, without including the children. His choice of doing it, and the way he portrayed them, was a unique approach. This awareness towards the child is of sociological significance, because it is the first time that we see children in Dutch art as being children, and not as little creatures waiting to be adults. Children had been present in the Netherlandish art before, however, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 14!Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, 9.! 15!Ibid., 2.! ! 5! Steen gave them a distinctive characteristic that was unprecedented in early depictions by artists such as Frans Hals, Jan Miense Molenaer, , and even Rembrandt. To reach a conclusion, this paper will draw comparisons between the children in Steen’s works, and mainly, but not limited to, Molenaer’s. But to get a better understanding of any artist’s work, the historicity of his oeuvre, and the culture and society of the time need to be discussed first.

! 6! 2. HISTORICITY

“Whoever wants to represent disorder properly must use disorder, and thus disorder becomes order.” –Jan Vos

The Eighty Years War had established a national identity for the Dutch, and helped articulate a specific Dutch culture in the Northern Netherlands. In painting, a highly distinct form of art began to develop and distinguished itself form the powerful arts of the Flanders.1 The new

Dutch society that emerged after the war was distinct in the whole of Europe. Elsewhere during this time, baroque style dominated the arts, which celebrated the royalties and

Catholicism, both of which lacked market and were absent in Dutch art. Perhaps partly because of limited contact with the classical and renaissance heritage of the South, and also having self-confidence in the Netherladnish tradition, the new Dutch school of art was marked by freshness and originality. 2 However, in the last decades of the seventeenth century, the French influence in the Netherlands was felt in the arts as well, and the Golden

Age of Dutch painting had come to an end.3 Thus, to study a fully independent culture and painting tradition is a difficult task, and the uniqueness of the seventeenth-century Dutch paintings has only recently been the focus of research.

Throughout history, scholars and authors have found it difficult to cope with Steen’s art. Their tendency to use catalogue raisonné to described the works of artists with large body work, has not made it any more comprehensible, since they only provide sporadic and short descriptions, and do not concentrate on any single work or subject within the works.

Furthermore, Steen’s reputation as a drunkard, whose life revolved around taverns and breweries, has historically contributed to the dismissal of his paintings. That reputation was

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 J. L. Price, Culture and Society in the During the 17th Century (New York: Scribner, 1974), 13. 2 Ibid., 119. 3 Ibid., 15.! ! 7! first started by Dutch writer Arnold Houbraken, who included the earliest account of Steen’s life in Groote Schouburgh in 1718. It was then elaborated on again by Jacob Weyerman’s plagiarized version of the same book in 1729. They concluded that Steen’s personality reflected in his paintings, thus lowering the quality of them. The link between Steen’s real life and his art is not entirely fabricated. Steen, born to a brewer father, invented a role for himself in his paintings, and early biographers, for the lack of better information on his life, took that role too seriously. Steen was not the first painter to guise himself. Northern

Netherlandish artists tended to represent themselves as the prodigal son, but the extent to which Steen went to in this transformation was unparalleled.4 Steen’s self-mocking role is understood as a moralizing message to the viewer, who may relate to that role. This is parallel to some of the literature of the time, speaking in first-person voice to tell a story.

Speaking in first person, Steen teaches by laughing at himself. This kind of self-criticism is found in the works of Erasmus. The difference is, that Steen does not do this by using traditional personifications. Instead, he depicts his own life as an allegory.5 While stories of

Steen’s brewery entrepreneurship may in fact be true, they masked the truth about his character and art for a long time. Such judgmental reviews by Steen’s biographers have their basis in the age-old assumption that the life and work of an artist are always related to each other,6 a notion that can be traced back to the early Italian Renaissance proverb, Ogni pittore dipinge sè (every painter paints himself).

The old belief that art comes from the artist’s inherent qualities of mind and character, and as such reflects his personality, continued to describe Steen by the writers of the eighteenth century. Romantics such as poet Heinrich Heine called Steen “the apostle of the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4 H. Perry Chapman, ”Jan Steen's Household Revisited,” Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art. Vol. 20, No. 2/3 (1991): 195-6. 5 Ibid., 191-192. 6 Lyckle de Vries, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (Bussum: Fibula van Dishoeck, 1972), 231.! ! 8! religion of pleasure.”7 As a result, Steen had been ignored for centuries by scholars and critics, who saw his work as a low genre depicting bad conduct. Classical theorists such as

Franciscus Junius and John Bishop, regarded Steen as a true genre painter, because his history paintings, though religiously questionable, were not top sellers of the time and hence posed no threat to the doctrine of the church. Indeed Steen emphasized in all his work, both in genre scenes and in history paintings, references to everyday reality. Classical beauty did not interest him at all, and he continued to use traditional theater costumes in all categories of painting.8 Of all Dutch masters, Steen was the least appreciated, until 1860, when French art historian Thoré-Bürger rejected the bias towards Steen’s comic mode.9 In fact, until that time, the whole of Dutch art of the seventeenth century and its meaning for its contemporary viewers had not been comprehensively understood. The realistic appearance of it had led many writers to believe that they represented the everyday life in the Dutch Republic. Then a new generation of scholars, mainly from the University of , initiated new interpretive studies of Dutch Golden Age paintings.10

The Dutch society and culture of the seventeenth century became the main subject of research again, when Mariët Westermann showed that the contradictions and parallels not only existed in the society in which Steen lived, but also between Steen’s own life and his art, and they were essential to his innovative achievements. Westermann’s The Amusements of

Jan Steen is the first comprehensive study and the most detailed analysis of Steen's relationship to comic literature and theater. Exposing the seventeenth-century sources, it shows how Steen became a comic painter and why his pictures appealed to his audience, the prosperous urban class. Similar ways of research has been the approach of choice for the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 7 H. Perry Chapman et la., Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller (Washington: National gallery of Art, 1996), 8. 8 Lyckle de Vries. Jan Steen: Prinsjesdag (Bloemendaal: H.J.W. Becht, 1992), 90-91. 9 Peter C. Sutton and Marigene H. Butler, “The Life and Art of Jan Steen,” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol.78 (1982): 3. 10 Wayne Frantis, Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1.! ! 9! interpretation of Steen’s works. Among the new interpreters, Svetlana Alpers called attention to the pictorial mode of Dutch paintings, pointing out that Dutch pictures do not capture the reality itself but rather a perception of the real world. In her view, Dutch pictures seek to depict the real world by description. To interpret her rather complicated interpretation of

Dutch art is outside of the scope of this paper, but suffice to say that if that were the case, then Steen’s works are overburdened with social rituals of the seventeenth-century .

Eric Jan Sluijter, another critic of iconology argued that Dutch contemporaries were more interested in the visual appeal and delight of paintings rather than in depictions of reality.11

Eddy De Jongh, whose iconographic interpretations are indebted in the works of Erwin

Panofsky, applied the principles of disguised symbolism to seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. He maintained that the meanings of Dutch paintings, often didactic in nature, are concealed by symbolism beneath their seemingly realistic surfaces.12 Recent art historians have taken a more critical approach to iconography, and the presumed presence of hidden symbols in Dutch art has been hotly debated. The foundations of iconography lie in Italian history paintings, and to utilize this method in relation to Dutch paintings arises problems of incompatibility and inconsistency. Judging from the current state of scholarship, another shortcoming of iconological method is that it tends to avoid analysis of the style in which the work of art was produced.13

Most of Steen’s pictures that contained proverbs retained their original meaning until the ninetieth century, by which time the bourgeois had lost all affinity with the seventeenth century, and the meanings of Dutch paintings were forgotten.14 Fortunately, Jan Steen did not make the interpretation of his paintings too difficult for the following generations. Steen often created the impression of snap-shots of reality, with the addition of jokes and allusions !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 11 Frantis, Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered, 4. 12 Ibid., 2. 13 Ibid., 3. 14 Ibid., 52.! ! 10! in his work, which should be seen in the context of the seventeenth-century culture. The clues to the meaning of some of his paintings are given by means of text on a piece of paper in the picture. Others are self-descriptive enough to convey the message. Steen’s audience, who must have been familiar with the contemporary farces and comedies, recognized and enjoyed the tone of language and expressions in his pictures.15 Sturla Gudlaugsson observed the influence of theater and poetry in the works of Steen, and in her book, The Comedians in the Work of Jan Steen and His Contemporaries, he argued that the wittily contrived figures of Jan Steen were fixed types in the repertory of the theater.16 Gudlaugsson’s work seems promising at first, when he takes a historicist approach to the theatrical look of Steen’s characters and settings, integrating art historical methods with cultural history. But he claims that any comic representation was subject to the beholder’s moral understanding. By that he reduces comic painting to a mere message similar to any other genre of painting. All in all, so much has been written about the social, cultural, and historical facts behind Steen’s art, and how it converged in Dutch culture, but the children in his pictures have escaped a full attention.

In order to teach and delight in a way that would keep his audience guessing and entertained, Steen wrapped some of his messages in symbolic associations, the key to which were later lost over time. This makes Steen’s intentions and the degree of reality he painted hard to estimate.17 Although there was a certain degree of didactic element in Steen’s art, his real subject was the physical world and its surroundings, with little to no attention to abstract ideas.18 He used himself as a handy free model, and created for himself a folly character that fooled his critics and biographers alike. Simon Schama describes the seventeenth-century

Holland as a balance of paradoxes between morals and matter. He discusses how Steen !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 15 Frantis. Looking at Seventeen-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered, 45. 16 Ibid., 10. 17 Ibid., 24 18 J. L. Price, Culture and Society in the Dutch Republic During the 17th Century, 128.! ! 11! reflected the politics not only in comic pictures, but also in more serious scenes such as The

Burgher of Delft and His Daughter (Fig. 2). The work, which is a hybrid of several subject varieties in the painting such as portrait, townscape, genre and still-life, addresses the politics of the day by comparing the two children of the different society classes. Despite of writing a whole long chapter on the children in the Republic, Schama, too, fails to examine or inspect closely the depictions of children in Dutch art. Ironically, The Burgher of Delft and

His Daughter was used as the cover art for Schama’s book, and brought the formerly ignored painting into spotlight.19 In the process of cleaning up Steen’s reputation as a drunkard, his self-image in the pictures has largely been overlooked. Paradoxically, the attempt of modern scholars to lessen the degree of realism in Steen’s art in order to clear him from the accusations of the eighteenth-century writers, has casted a shadow and ambiguity over the roles of Steen and other characters in his paintings.20 Perhaps the children in his pictures have suffered the most and have virtually been ignored altogether.

Considerable scholarly debate has pondered the relationship between the children and adults in the early modern times. It has been argued that children ware not regarded as belonging to a separate age with its own characteristics, but rather as small people, to be shaped into respectful grown-ups. Many of Pieter Bruegel’s children support this theory.

They look like miniature adults, who embody human folly, and are joyless with minimal facial expressions.21 From the pictures of children throughout the ages, it can be maintained that childhood was a cultural concept created and regulated by adults, and then projected into the individuals they regard in this way as children. Thus, it is nearly impossible to see what was it like to be a seventeenth-century child in the Netherlands.22 Historians have tended to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 19 Sheila D. Muller, “Jan Steen’s Burgher of Delft and his Daughter: A Painting and Politics in Seventeenth- Century Holland,” Art History, Vol.12 (1989): 268. 20 Ibid., 183. 21 Larry Slive, Pieter Bruegel (New York and London: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2011), 39.! 22 Thomas, Impressionist Children: Childhood, Family, and Modern Identity in French Art, 11. ! 12! generally define childhood in any particular era, but it is not always a clear-cut picture, as the concept of childhood and when it begins and ends, varies. In the seventeenth-century

Netherlands, the ages of life, known as the “ladder of life,” were divided into steps. For young boys, mischievous behavior was expected and tolerated to a certain degree, as it showed the transition from childhood to manhood.23 Young children became acquainted with the facts of life and were educated about sexuality from an early age.24 These can be observed in the paintings of Steen and Molenaer. However, what most of the scholars have failed to discuss at any meaningful length, are the possible connection between the children in the works of Steen and Molenaer, who has remained somewhat understudied.

For a remarkable painting career that expands nearly half a century, the sources and literature have been awkwardly silent, not giving the credit that Molenaer deserves.

Seventeenth-century references to Molenaer are limited to the comments written by

Theodorus Schrevelius in his 1648 publication on the history of Haarlem, Harlemias. There,

Molenaer is only mentioned within the context of his wife, Judith Leyster. Writers of the following century, who favored classical painters such as Adriaen van der Werff and Jacob de

Wit, criticized the subject matter, as well as the coarse and painterly manner of Molenaer’s peasant scenes. The nineteenth century saw small enthusiasm for Molenaer's pictures, but this new interest resulted in a great deal of confusion regarding the painter, his oeuvre, and the identities of the various artists who carried the Molenaer surname. Adding to the misinformation, John Smith in 1833 writes about a Mins Nicholas Molenaer in the section devoted to "scholars and imitators of Jan Steen." Smith created a hybrid by combining the names of Jan Miense and his brother Nicolaes. To make matters worse, he noted that

Molenaer was born “in Amsterdam in 1627.” Another nineteenth-century scholar described

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 23 Benjamin Roberts, Sex and Drugs Before Rock 'n' Roll: Youth Culture and Masculinity During Holland's Golden Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 15-19. 24 Ibid., 29.! ! 13! Molenaer as "a genre and landscape painter, who was active in Anrwerp.” Wilhelm von

Bode in 1871 saw enough differences between Molenaer's early pictures and his later peasant compositions, to attribute Molenaer's oeuvre to two different painters.25 By the end of the nineteenth century, archival research conducted by Van der Willegen and Abraham

Bredius corrected much of the earlier misinformation about Molenaer. Attribution questions still linger, but have not impacted the painter's renowned accomplishments. 26 While iconographic investigations have proven connections with theater and literature, such as the works of Gerbrand Adriaenszoon Bredero and Jacob Cats, Dutch playwrights, who also link to Jan Steen a generation later, the relation between the two painters has largely been overlooked.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 25 Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, 5. 26 Ibid., 6.! ! 14! 3. ARTISTIC DIALOUGE

“One should have achieved a degree of understanding that would allow one to distinguish the most beautiful of life's beauties and select it.” –

In our time, originality is considered the main criterion on which the work of an artist must meet. In the seventeenth century, it was an unknown idea. With old traditions as a guide, a painter was not supposed to unexpectedly arrive with something totally new. A painter was supposed to choose a well-known and respected topic as an example. It certainly did not have to be the artist’s own invention, but he was supposed to attempt to emulate and even if possible, surpass the old masters. This did not imply plagiarism or copying, but an independent, inventive process of growing up as an emerging artist. This living link with the artistic past and tradition was something inspiring for the artist. A dialogue with the past was an important element in Steen’s work. 1 Despite having difficulties with anatomy and perspectives, Steen is one of the very few Dutch painters who covered a wide variety of formats and many different topics. There is no doubt that Steen was a creative artist with a vivid imagination. But even so, every artist makes use of already existing ideas. In fact, Steen borrowed one of his first child figures from Van Ostade; a boy with his back to the viewer and with his hands in his pockets (Fig. 3), a figure that Steen used in various paintings (Fig.

4). The extent of Steen’s studying of van Ostade’s art is hard to evaluate, because only one drawing can be with certainty attributed to Steen (Fig. 5a & 5b)2, whereas countless of drawings by van Ostade have survived.

There have been a number of incidental finds, which have led scholars to believe that at least some of Steen’s children were not drawn from live models. In The Drawing Lesson !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 De Vries. Jan Steen: Prinsjesdag, 74. 2 Peter Schatborn, Dutch Figure Drawings from the Seventeenth Century (: National Government Publication, 1981), 79.! ! ! 15! (Fig. 6), the boy has been said to resemble a figure in ’s The Letter (Fig. 7).

However, such random and small similarities can be due to the fact that there can only be a finite number of ways in which a head is tilted or turned. Even if Steen had the painting in mind, he still rendered his own version with his unique sense of facial expressions.3 He has made the point explicit by the boy’s glance at the teacher, showing only his upper body and omitting the body language. Steen has been said to have borrowed children types from

Rembrandt as well. The crying girl in The Sacrifice of Iphigenia (Fig. 8a) has been interpreted as a reverse type of a Rembrandt’s etching from 1637 (Fig. 8b).4 The connections could be made even further. The dozing boy in A School for Boys and Girls (Fig. 9b) could suggest that Steen imitated the figure of Heraclitus in Raphael’s The School of Athens (Fig. 9b), which he would have seen in a graving by Giorgio Ghisi. However, the sheer number of individual vignettes in which each of the children have been uniquely rendered in the school scene, supports the argument of this paper that Steen did not systematically copy his child figures from any particular artist. Rather, he occasionally made references to the works of well-known artists. Another Steen’s painting, The Egg Dance (Fig. 10a), is crowded with over forty figures, making them virtually impossible to have been all copied. However, the toddler in the foreground bears remarkable similarities to a drawing by Rembrandt (Fig. 10b).

Regarding Steen’s relationship with Haarlem artists, we have remarkably little information. However, it is generally accepted that he knew Frans Hals. Steen’s multi-figure compositions are similar to Frans Hals’ group portraitures, which he would have seen in

Haarlem. Furthermore, two paintings by Frans Hals that hang on the wall in some of Steen’s depicted households, provide evidence of Steen’s contact with the old master in Haarlem. In the twenties and thirties, the in Haarlem bloomed. But when Steen came to live

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 John Walsh, Jan Steen: The Drawing Lesson (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 18. 4 Jeroen Giltaij and Peter Hecht, Senses and Sins: Dutch Painters of Daily Life in the Seventeenth Century (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2004), 93. ! 16! there in 1661, there was no market for large, expensive genre scenes. By that time, the

Haarlem school of art was dominated by history painters. Impressive biblical and mythological pieces also appear in Steen’s oeuvre, however, they do not define his character as a painter. It is almost an impossible task to put Steen’s subjects in orderly sequence, but his production between 1660 and 1670, the period when he lived in Haarlem, consisted mainly of small and medium-sized pieces.5 With this change, Steen started a series of genre pieces, which are known in old inventories as "spoiled household." This theme, Steen treated with infinite variations and the children often play a great part in it.6 It can be said that Steen made his progress in Haarlem, where he studied with Adriaen van Ostade and his brother, Isaac.7 There, he absorbed the Haarlem tradition of scenes of ordinary life, such as markets, inns, peasant festivals, and ordinary children. It was in Haarlem where he painted many of his most successful works.

Steen also seems to have had some contact in Haarlem with Jan Miense Molenaer and his wife, Judith Leyster. During this time, the choice of subject is often related for both

Steen and Molenaer, but the degree of elaboration in their work is different.8 For instance, both Steen and Molenaer painted children teasing cats. But Steen simply took on an old theme and added his own twists to it. In Children Teaching a Cat to Dance (Fig. 11), four children are making a kitten on the table to dance, while one of them plays a tune on the flute. The dog leaving a loud barking makes his addition to the picture be heard, but above all, is the head of an old man, who has found pleasure in the children’s cruel games. By adding the dog and the old man’s head, Steen has taken the familiar subject of teasing a cat a big step further. It is an event without any content or meaning, but it strikes hard. It

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 5 De vries, Jan Steen: Prinsjesdag, 40.! 6 C. H. De Jonge, Een Reeks Monografieen̈ over Hollandsche en Vlaamsche Schilders (Amsterdam: Becht, 1939), 29. 7 Walsh, Jan Steen: The Drawing Lesson, 9-10.! 8 Wouter Th. Kloek. Een Huishouden van Jan Steen (Hilversum: Verlore, 1998), 33.! ! 17! elevates the subject to the level of a philosophical reflection, by ignoring the childhood pleasures, while expressing the human annoyance in the old man. The joys and sorrows of children are shown again in the many depictions of The St. Nicholas Night (Fig. 12). The joy of the girl who has newly acquired a nice present contrasts the sorrow of the eldest boy, who doesn’t get what he wanted, while their siblings hearty laugh. This kind of psychological approach to childhood games and pleasures is uniquely Steen’s innovation, and is not found in the works of Molenaer or any other Haarlem, or Dutch painter for that matter.9

However much influenced by other artists Steen may had been, stylistically he was independent, combining all influences ha had received from different schools of art into a manner completely his own. He covered a wide range of subjects, with an immense knowledge of the literature, the Bible, the theater, and the history of art. Steen painted situations that are recognizable immediately, and are still part of the Dutch culture, such as

The Feast of S.t Nicholas. His clever view of everyday reality, however unrealistically it may have been presented in the paintings, is our window to the world of the seventeenth century.10 One problem concerning the paintings attributed to Steen is that their quality varies considerably. They can be fine, coarse, light, or dark. This may be due to having studio workers, who painted differently than the master himself. It is also possible that some of his unfinished works were touched up later with different interpretations. The idea that art should be an expression of individual talent, is a nineteenth-century concept. For painters with assistants that view was not an issue. Unlike for researchers of Rembrandt, the quality of the work of Jan Steen, or whether he finished a work all by himself is not a concern for art historians.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9 Jonge, Een Reeks Monografieen̈ over Hollandsche en Vlaamsche Schilders, 42. 10 Wouter Th. Kloek, Jan Steen: 1626-1679 (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2005), 5.! ! 18! 4. CHILDREN IN ART

“All those born of cats are inclined to catch mice.” –Jacob Cats

The image of a child can be a representation, and not a real individual. In representations from the Renaissance, such as Madonna and Child, the child is an allegory of childhood, and not a recognizable character. Botticelli’s cherubs are types of children with no distinct features. It is only in portraits of real children that some individual characteristics are distinguished. However, they are abstracts of little human beings, rather than aspects of childhood.1 Humans are diverse creatures, and children even more so, because they are inconsistent. At times they can be ignorant, jealous, silly, or even cruel. It provides the excellent opportunity to explore and show human emotions and weaknesses. The innocence of the child makes it easy to reveal the truth. In The Apple Pealer (Fig. 13) by Gerard ter

Borch, the child has sensed the sadness of her mother, who looks concerned. The viewer sees the sadness of the mother through the worried expression of the child. In Frans Hals’ pictures of drinking boys, their red cheeks reveal their happiness and joy. In Rembrandt’s

The Abduction of Ganymede, the child is frightened to death and is peeing on the world of the living, which has neglected him. Rembrandt is not giving a moralizing lesson, nor is Frans

Hals. But in Jan Steen’s Village School (Fig. 14), for example, we see a moralizing message.

By showing that the punishment of some is the reward for others, it tells us that children learn the good values of life in school.

Because of the high death rate among children in Europe in pre- and early modern period, children were considered precious in carrying on the family line.2 Thus children had both economic significance and emotional bonds. Early portraits of parents with their

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Marie Christine Autin Graz, Children in Painting (Milan: Skira Editore S. p. A., 2002), 9. 2 Shearer West, Oxford History of Art: Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 117.! ! 19! children illustrate this issue. However, often adults chose how the child is to be shown. In some periods, children are shown as adults in miniature, with adult qualities and clothes, in a very formal pose. There was the lack of playfulness and innocence of childhood. Many such pictures of children do not really represent the state of childhood, but the adult-to-be.3 Due to a better social and psychological understanding, from the seventeenth century onwards it became more common to stress the child’s distinctiveness from adults, and to show the contrast between young and old.4 Now the artist had to work with the physiognomy of the child, which enables us to look at the face for suggestions of character, for expression of mood and emotion. But in formal portraiture, where seldom a flash of teeth is shown, it is still hard to read too much into the child’s personality. By the seventeenth century, portraits of parents and children became less formal and concentrated more on the social aspect of different generations.5 Therefore, a little bit of informality had been permitted in portraits of children.6

One of the greatest concerns for the seventeenth-century parents, as well as in any century for that matter, was the proper upbringing of a child. The Dutch society believed that good parenting would result in the children to become good adults. That assumption holds that children inherit the qualities of their parents and learn by their examples, and ultimately, they will sing like their parents.7 The proverb that, “if a child is accustomed to evil, later he will not change,” shows how real was the fear that the child might grow into a sinful adult.8 Steen used this thought to make a number of paintings, which make statements about human nature. The festive theme of As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young (Fig. 15),

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 West, Oxford History of Art: Portraiture, 132. 4 Ibid., 135. 5 Ibid., 116. 6 Alexander Sturgis, Faces (London: National Gallery Publications, 1998), 54. 7 Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century, 161. 8 Mary Frances Durantini, The Child in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1979), 14. ! 20! illustrated in the scenes of misbehaving children, refers exactly to this concern.9 Many of such scenes are concerned with the mother-child relationship. This is because the mother often took a greater responsibility for the child in their early years, as the father worked to make a living for the family. A number of Steen’s pictures showing the mistress of the household intoxicated, leaving the children to carry out their vicious plans, are illustrated examples of bad mothering, rather than picking on the children.

The children are presented in paintings for a reason, and rarely just for the sake of illustrating childhood. In Steen’s paintings, the child provokes commentary upon the character of the adult. Children’s behavior either reflects or contrasts the demeanor of the adults around them. It shows what kind of adults they will become, based on the teachings of their parents. Therefore, children in paintings are used as a device to comment upon the behavior of the adults, and not on the children themselves. Hence the scenes with children are extremely didactic, and their role varies in each context.10 The activities of the child were deemed as mirroring the child’s future, therefore it was paid attention to. Consequently, the child was a device through which the artist pointed out the concerns with the process of growing up, and by the same token, reflected the problems that come with adulthood. As a result, the use of children in art drew attention to the adult, whose character the child helped to define. This awareness towards the child is of historical significance, because it is the first time that attempts are made to draw a connection between the child and the world of adulthood.11

Childhood is best characterized by means of games and toys, and for Steen the world was a child’s play. Certain activities and toys could have explained the child’s character, such as a hoop, that could allude to being driven in the wrong path. A child playing a drum is !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9 Durantini, The Child in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting, 5.! 10 Ibid., 6. 11 Ibid., 297-302. ! 21! essentially making noise and disturbance, and it is a senseless activity. 12 Steen’s moral messages are often conveyed by showing what one ought not to do. In his many depictions of children playing with cats, a sexual connotation may be applied if the pet is held in such a position as to have its genitalia exposed. In cases of feeding a pet, however, the message is that of wastefulness. A cat made to dance while being offered a pipe by another child, is a sexual allusion to pastimes of adult, illustrated by means of children and animals. These images are not meant as commentary on the children, who are still too young to commit such sins, but to mock and satirize the adults, while at the same time raising a moral issue.13

Steen’s pictures of children show how closely he observed their pleasures and grieves.

In A Peasant Family at Meal-Time (Fig. 16), the girl has put her hands together and says a prayer, while peeping at the meal. She has dropped the string by which she had dragged her toy. She has just now interrupted her game. Thus by depicting the present and the immediate past, the scene shows a daily routine in the child’s life.14 In Easy Come, Easy Go

(Fig. 17), which is a warning to gamblers, a boy in the foreground pouring wine is so completely focused on his task, that he could be cropped into a separate painting and still be meaningful. In another version painted a year earlier, the boy is situated in front of the old woman, and a large empty chair is in his place in the front. One can assume that Steen liked the later version more, since he made the change. His reasoning could have simply been stylistic, since the bright colors of the boy’s stockings and coat complement the vivid colors of the table rug.15 Nevertheless, it is also tempting to think that perhaps Steen saw the boy as a good storyteller. Steen used emblematic elements, but did not depend on them to convey his message. His message is often loud enough. In the Village School painting in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 12 Durantini, The Child in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting, 223.! 13 Ibid., 280-287. 14 Donna R. Barnes and Peter G. Rose, Childhood Pleasures: Dutch Children in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 64. 15 Ibid., 41. ! 22! Dublin, the unlit lantern may refer to the darkness of ignorance towards enlightenment, but one does not need to see that to understand that the child is being punished just for that.16

Because children in Steen’s stories usually either misbehave or mock the behaviors of adults, the humor in his pictures has often been misinterpreted. A painting of the subject of

St. Nicholas in Paris, has been called from “Naughty Girl” to “Disgraced on St. Nicholas’

Day,” to “The Retarded Child.” 17 However, children in Steen’s pictures are not always mischievous. In depictions of the popular proverbs such as like father like son, drunken adults are making questionable behaviors and setting bad examples in the presence of children. Steen probably took up this subject from the Flemish painter . Like

Jordaens, Steen depicted different generations caught in the act of rather immoral activities.18 However, Steen’s characters are not as sober. He stresses on the family circle, and children in these scenes are not used to comment upon the behavior of adults, at least not as much as in other paintings. They do not mimic the behavior of their guardians; rather, they simply act as children enjoying the feast. In The Meal in Uffizi (Fig. 18), the enjoyment of the boy’s violin fills the air. One senses Steen’s respect and love for children, and in spite of reminding the transience of time, the music is charming. It is a nice and beautiful afternoon, and life is good for the moment. The paintings, in which children play with cards and dice, against the moralizing advices found in emblem books, do not necessarily need to be read as a reference to gambling. Cards could have also been used to learn counting.19

Few painters have managed to capture human expressions and sentiments as they are in real life, in private homes. Steen was an expert at catching the grown ups off guard in their questionable activities. His figures are not posed; they are caught up in the most amusing !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 16 Durantini, The Child in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting, 120.! 17 Peter C. Sutton and Marigene H. Butler, “The Life and Art of Jan Steen,” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. 78, No. 337/338 (1982): 9. 18 Ibid., 34. 19 Barnes and Rose, Childhood Pleasures: Dutch Children in the Seventeenth Century, 96.! ! 23! moments of their lives. Some of the most amusing, but not the most comical figures in

Steen’s pictures, are the children. They gaze at the viewer as if to tell the whole story of what is happening. As naïve and innocent children, they have the advantage to see and tell without prejudice or preference. They simply observe and report to us.20 Children were often painted as sneaky little creatures, who were capable of doing malicious acts, such as taking money out of mother’s pocket while she was intoxicated.21 Steen’s mischievous children often act practical jokes and have pranks hidden in the innocence of their childhood. While

Rembrandt never obscured the characters of children in his paintings, Steen shows them naughty. Yet, at the same time, they inspire the viewer, and hold the key to understanding the moralizing message. Children in Steen’s pictures sneak up on adults during the festivities, steal food, take a pull at the pipe, sip a wine, and tease cats. In particular, the festivals of Sinterklaas and the Twelfth Night, provided Steen the ideal stage to showcase the malicious joy of children at the expense of drunken grown-ups. In schools, the situation is not much better. Chaos and noisy fun are still the order of the day, while the master sleeps on. However, in spite of all these misbehaviors, a sort of didactic message is still delivered in ways of narrative genre.22 The terms genre and comic painting were not coined yet in the seventeenth century, but a broad category of paintings featuring distinctive laugh-inducing themes were seen as funny. To understand the degree of Molenaer’s influence on Steen, it is crucial to first understand the Dutch comic tradition and how painters responded to it.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 20 “Works of the Great Masters: Jan Steen,” The Illustrated Magazine of Art, Vol. 2, No. 9 (1853): 167. 21 Ibid., 163. 22 Schmidt Degener, Jan Steen (London: John Lane the Bodley Head Limited, 1927), 19.! ! 24! 5. COMIC TRADIDITION IN THE LOW COUNTRIES

“The imitation of life, the glass of custom, and the image of truth.” -Cicero

Cicero’s definition of comedy implies an imitation of life as it should not be lived. Its function was to instruct in an entertaining way. Comic painting in the seventeenth century was a broad category meant to be seen as humorous and discussed with delight. Most of Steen’s comics are visual translations of the written narratives. They prompt the viewer to translate his painted narratives back into comic tales, and to find sources in comic literature. Steen’s genre pictures are sometimes crude and lacking in originality, or even overtly witty, to the point of the comical mode overshadowing any moralizing message that there might be.

Sometimes Steen parodies his subject, both in content and form, by clowning himself in it, looking at the viewer as he laughs. He mixes the obscenity with the virtue, humor with drama, comic with tragic, young with old, and creates images that are unique and unprecedented.1 Sometimes Steen intentionally gives us several layers of meaning, and we do not know at first sight exactly what is implied. His best works invite his cultured viewers to look again to find the message. Mariët Westermann noted in her monumental Ph.D. dissertation that, “This is comic art for the discerning clever folks, and as such it works as discriminant, separating the sophisticated from the thigh-slappers.”2 Indeed, many of Steen’s paintings were imitations of popular farces that required the ability to judge, and as such relate to contemporary ideals of civility, which only the high-class would recognize.

The eloquence of the body was one of the things that were taught to the city folks in the Dutch Republic. The theoretical writings of Karel van Mander, Samuel van Hoogstraten,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Baruch D. Kirschen, The Religious and Historical Paintings of Jan Steen (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 23. 2 Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century, 242. ! 25! and Gerard de Lairesse, all press the issue of postures and gestures in descriptive ways.3

Paintings often illustrated the desired elegance and uprightness, and sometimes its opposite demeanor of the peasant in juxtaposition. Such paintings visualized social distinctions and functioned as conversation pieces, challenging one’s ability to judge between gracefulness and clumsiness.4 The tradition of depicting peasants with their lack of grace was started in the sixteenth century by Pieter Bruegel, and Steen, like Adriaen van Ostade and Adriaen

Brouwer, built on it.5 Art historians situate Steen’s works in relation to Netherlandish comic texts, jokes, proverbs, poems, and performed comedies and farces. They believe that Steen was involved with playwrights and actors known as rederijkers, or rhetoricians.6 In addition to his native folklore, Steen obviously knew the Bible and ’s Metamorphoses, and unquestionably knew the writings of Erasmus and Jacob Cats, as well as the dramas by playwrights like Gerbrand Bredero and Jan Vos.7 In comic painting, the main goal was the rendering of flawed stereotypes in a way that would be recognizable. These figures were caught doing questionable or embarrassing acts, performing lifestyles that were not deemed desirable by the cultured audience. In effect, comedy’s main function was to entertain and instruct by way of laughter.8

In finding the roots of Steen’s comic mode, it is important to review the relationship that existed between the Netherlandish artists, and the theater. Since 1480, the Painters’

Guild of St. Luke in had worked closely with the rederijkers, until the formation of a separate painters’ academy ended the common club in 1663. During that time, the artists sometimes wrote poetry or playwright for the theater. Karel van Mander, in his youth, wrote

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 Herman Roodenburg, The Eloquence of the Body: Perspectives on Gesture in the Dutch Republic (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2005), 116. 4 Ibid., 119. 5 Ibid., 129. 6 Chapman et la., Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, 53. 7 Kloek, Jan Steen: 1626-1679, 65. 8 Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, 45.! ! 26! farces and designed the stage. Similar cooperation existed also in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Frans Hals, Esias van de Velde, and , among others, worked with the performing arts in Haarlem. Jan Steen was not a member of such clubs, but he painted them at their meetings, and drew themes from their plays. He helped illustrate the connection that gave painters the reputation of being good actors.9 It is conceivable that

Steen was influenced by the comedies of the theater, subjects of which he later repeatedly painted. Steen then transformed the art of acting onto his paintings by depicting himself as well as other figures as performers on stage. 10 Rederijker comedies were explicitly moralizing. In these plays, the fool often spoke the truth and alarmed men and women.

Steen’s works are also characterized by a theatrical mode. They are often in the form of old proverbs,11 with the difference being that he gives the role of the fool to himself, and sometimes to children.

Comedy had been considered the low genre of art since the days of antiquity.12 In the

Low Countries during the seventeenth century, certain pleasures and activities of peasants were used in comedy. Such themes had appeared after the triumph of realistic style in Dutch art in the beginning of the century. Peasants in comic poems such as those of Gerbrand

Bredero are comparable in terms of realistic “low art” with the paintings of Kermises of Karel van Mander and his contemporaries.13 Although these works were believed to be drawn directly from life, very few if any painting actually showed the real living and working conditions of the peasant and the poor. 14 The comic mode combined with realism in

Netherlandish painting were means of intellectual expression and communication in the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9 Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 41. 10 Ibid., 42. 11 Chapman, ”Jan Steen's Household Revisited.” 190. 12 Svetlana Alpers, “Realism as a Comic Mode: Low-Life Painting Seen through Bredero's Eyes,” Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, vol. 8, no. 3 (1975-6): 119. 13 Ibid., 127-8. 14 Ibid., 115.! ! 27! seventeenth century.15 The comic attitude depended on the level of engagement of the viewer, but generally they were intended to alert the viewer of the dangers of bad behavior associated with low-class people. Peasants were depicted as ridiculous fools whose sinful behavior needed to be avoided.16 The way a culture reacts to its fools tells much about the culture itself, and understanding the Dutch fool's role will help us understand what aspect of

Steen’s art was considered humoristic in the Netherlands during the Golden Age.

Medieval Europeans believed that all people are fools because they are sinners.17

Fools violate customs and conventions, and they can act as punishment, warning, or praise.

They highlight a culture's values and core assumptions, exposing its points of conflict.18 In poetry, the purpose was not to feel pity for the fool but to endorse the realism.19 Sebastian

Brant's Ship of Fools was one of the widely read books in the Renaissance, and its impact reached The Netherlands and the Flanders, too.20 Performing dramas involving fools in the

Low Countries has a long tradition that can be traced back to fifteenth-century Flemish lands of modern-day northern France.21 Fools were outside the social norm and played roles that would cause laughter. In late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, peasants were also added to the fool category, for these rural folks were not sophisticated as the middle-class.

Their role was to draw commentary on examples of bad behavior either by ridiculing or by displaying such conduct themselves.22 In early Dutch drama, there was often a peasant's wife selling eggs, or a quack attempting to sell his merchandise. At times the audience was brought into the stage, making them potential buyers of egg sellers and quacks, hence

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 15 Hessel Miedema, “Realism and Comic Mode: The Peasant,” Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, vol. 9, No. 4 (1977): 219. 16 Alpers, “Realism as a Comic Mode: Low-Life Painting Seen through Bredero's Eyes,” 122-4. 17 Clifford Davidson, Fools and Folly (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996), 74. 18 Ibid., 47. 19 Ibid., 39. 20 Ibid., 48. 21 Ibid., 112. 22 Ibid., 114-5.! ! 28! becoming victims of fools. Thus the real madness and folly lied among the audience, who were fooled.23 Dutch fools warn people to avoid ending up fools, and in fact fools in Dutch dramas were not as foolish as they seemed.24

This realistic-looking interpretation of life, which was considered comical, had a long existence in literature. The peasants in Bredero's poems were not meant to make the audience laugh, but simply to appeal to the instinct of feasting and pleasure.25 In painting, too, it was common to treat low-life as comical. Subjects with conventional simple realism, such as peasant brawls of van Ostade (Fig. 19), whether amusing, disgusting, funny or ugly, appealed to viewers. Fools as laughing figures were used to show the low social status of them, for it was conceived that the way a character laughed could be used to show the person's class. Thus, laughter at farces showed the foolish approval of the audience, who by laughing became the second fool unwillingly.26 The ability to use theatrical expression in a manner true to nature had long been fundamental to narrative painting, particularly of historical themes. This concept transferred to the genre of comic scenes from everyday life.27

In the tradition of Bruegel, peasants were often depicted as ugly in appearance to disturb the viewer by what they are doing. Their lowness separated them from the rest of the society with a “them versus us” mentality.28 In some paintings emphasis seems to have been on the dangers of sins, not on the pleasures or the peasants themselves, nor their celebrations.

Because in the mind of the middle-class, activities such as fighting, drinking and vomiting was just what peasants did.29 However, to interpret paintings of bad behavior of the poor as indications to superiority of the middle-class, is made questionable by the fact that many

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 23 Davidson, Fools and Folly, 125-6. 24 Ibid., 141-2. 25 Alpers, “Realism as a Comic Mode: Low-Life Painting Seen through Bredero's Eyes,” 118. 26 Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century, 91-2. 27 Ibid., 22-5. 28 Alpers, “Realism as a Comic Mode: Low-Life Painting Seen through Bredero's Eyes,” 136-7. 29 Ibid., 124-6.! ! 29! times members of this class have been depicted in the same situation.30 The wide range of tones and topics of comic paintings makes interpretation hard, but generally the comic view is stronger than the moralistic one, perhaps because it is the peasants and not the middle- class viewer, who are in the center of attention.31 However, iconographic studies reveal that there were certain elements of moral instruction in what appeared to be realistic representations of life.32

While tragedies dealt with well-spoken upper-class people, comedies were about everyday life of the lower class, and although the dominant middle-class did not fit into either group, theater plays crossed social boundaries and were not exclusive.33 Comic humor and theater was a regulator of class and identity, and comic characters taught the audience where their place in society is, by invoking laughter at abnormal behavior.34 Seventeenth- century European theater was also a criticizing tool used for social protest. With its impersonations of gender, sexuality, marriage, adultery, gender, class and religion, the stage was a place for the confirmation of personal identity.35 To address these social concerns, and to ensure the comic interpretation, traditional devices such as costumes, gestures, age, and class distinction were used to invite people to laughter.36 The more intimate nature of paintings, which were hung in private homes, compared to public domains of the theater, performance, and prints, extended the role of comic pictures beyond laughter. Looking at pictures allowed the high-class to feel the banned pleasures without getting involved in the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 30 Madlyn Millner Kahr, Dutch Painting in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, Inc, 1978), 174. 31 Alpers, “Realism as a Comic Mode: Low-Life Painting Seen through Bredero's Eyes,” 135. 32 Ibid., 116. 33 Angela Vanhaelen, Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam: Gender, Childhood and the City (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003), 4. 34 Ibid., 181. 35 Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century, 258. 36 Ibid., 114-5. ! 30! act, free of moral consequences.37 Pictures often changed the narrative and rarely rendered the literature with precision, and used iconographies to help viewer to follow the narrative, and unlike the plays, paintings left it open for the viewer’s interpretations.38

Close relationship existed between art and literature in the seventeenth century, and this connection was essential to the Netherlandish painting. The peasant scenes of Bruegel were drawn from the comic poetry of Bredero and were sought after by wealthy upper-class members in the Netherlands.39 Holland did not have a specific low-life genre until 1620s, when Flemish-born Adriaen Brouwer introduced the peasant scenes to Dutch audiences.

Later, Adriaen van Ostade succeeded him, but the peasants tend to be more cleaned up.40

The images of follies were favorite subjects for many painters, and appealed to artists such as Judith Leyster, Jan Miense Molenaer, and Frans Hals, whose use of bright colors and foolish expressions enhanced the comic effect. 41 The popularity of genre subjects of peasants, happy gatherings, and brothel scenes is evident in the number of such paintings in after-death inventories of art collectors, and the increase in their value also explains the high demand for them.42 Comics projected social disorder into a lower-class space, and often generated meanings and uses that potentially differed from their intended functions. They had no boundaries of space, gender, and class, and carried the imagery message to a wide and uncontrolled range of audience. 43 However, Calvinists' patience had a limit, and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 37 Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century, 124.! 38 Ibid., 105-8. 39 Peter C. Sutton, Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984), xxvii. 40 Jakob Rosenberg et la., Dutch At and Architecture: 1600-1800, 170-180. 41 James A. Welu, Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1993), 130. 42 Michael North, Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 110- 12. 43 Vanhaelen, Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam: Gender, Childhood and the City, 16-8.! ! 31! paintings of lust were thought to be morally dangerous. Jan Steen was testing this limit when he painted brothel and tavern scenes with intoxicated women.

The seventeenth-century viewer was familiar with comic characters through theater and literature, and would understand the humor. Although certain motifs such as red stockings and flutes had erotic implication, the interrelation of the elements determined the meaning.44 For instance, the subject of the doctor's visit that was used many times by Mieris,

Netscher, and Steen, reflected lovesickness.45 Among the Old Dutch Masters, Steen most vividly has deployed the comedy stage and theatrical actors to make representations of everyday life during the seventeenth century. His scenes are a form of Dutch reality where people are acting on the stage,46 and among his leading characters are children. Bruegelian peasant scenes by Ostade and Molenaer had introduced Steen to Flemish genre painting,47 however, most of Steen's works do not feature peasants, but well-dressed figures in urban settings. Thus, Steen upgraded the Bruegelian characters to middle-class, but by the standards of the urban elite his characters were still peasant-like and low in rank.48 By including himself in the picture, Steen minimized the distance between the viewer and the subject, and portrayed himself as a sinful folly to tell the truth.49 Including himself in his pictures was a distinctive feature of Steen’s work, and it intensifies the viewer’s response and reminds us that the scene is staged.50

Steen's paintings were sometimes excessively moralistic, sometimes merely parody.

Steen carefully used symbolic emblems and sometimes inscribed his message into the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 44 Wayne Franits, Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered, 45-6. 45 Chapman et la., Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, 150. 46 S. J. Gudlaugsson, The Comedian in the Works of Jan Steen and his Contemporaries (Soest: Davaco Publishers, 1975), 5-9. 47 Chapman et la., Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, 159. 48 Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century, 196-9. 49 Chapman et la., Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, 43-4. 50 Wayne Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 208. ! 32! picture, and it was often a warning or a moral admonition. Thoré-Bürger believed that

Steen's jokes had a moral function and were not mere farces.51 Steen employed a stock of human types, whose predictable actions were deemed laughable, but also the choice of dress played a key role in establishing a comical effect. Steen used outdated costumes in order to convey the comic content of his paintings.52 He also mixed historical themes with low-comedy of light mode to combine the historical and contemporary issues, sometimes so strongly, like Bathsheba in a contemporary Dutch interior, that it overlaid the biblical theme completely.53 Many of his Biblical scenes are set in usual genre settings and look theatrical.

Paintings such as the Banquet of Anthony and Cleopatra or The Marriage of Tobias engage with contemporary social concerns and resemble peasant pictures.54 Steen's dissolute scenes ranging from chaotic taverns to family households, from drunken peasants to women and children, suggests that they are not simple imitations of realism, and that there is more to understand about the real “realities” of comic representations.55

Paintings traditionally functioned as instructive tools and only since the nineteenth century they have been enjoyed as pure aesthetic pleasures.56 In the seventeenth century, the aim of the artist would have been clear to the viewer. It was important to know the contemporary manners and codes of behavior, how to walk, sit, or stand with an elegant posture. Although these rules were not taken as seriously as, for example, in France and

England, because of a narrower range of social classes in the United Provinces, the ruling

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 51 Sutton, Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, xlvi. 52 Emilie E. S. Gordenker, “The Rhetoric of Dress in Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Portraiture,” The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, Vol. 57 (1999): 101. 53 Ibid., 91. 54 Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century, 277-84. 55 Nanette Salomon, Shifting Priorities: Gender and Genre in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 53. 56 Eddy de Jongh, Questions of Meaning: Theme and Motif in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting (: Primavera Press, 2000), 100. ! 33! class in towns were keen in distancing themselves from the lower class.57 Manuals on civility provided rules for proper manners and gesture, as well as how to keep the body erect.58

Peasants, on the other hand, were always depicted as stocky and hunched over figures, never standing erect. Thus the Dutch urban elite, in an attempt to civilize itself, interpreted comic pictures as defined codes of improper conduct. Comedy's task was to dictate the manners required from the upper class by showing them the unacceptable one.59 In a way, these pictures confirmed the superiority of the urban middle-class viewer over the peasants.60 However, the codes of proper behavior were often ignored by Steen's middle- class figures, even by himself. In Steen’s Haarlem days, history painting was gradually becoming antique,61 and he adapted to the new fashion by grasping the “ugliness” of reality, instead of the conventional classical ideal beauties. By depicting reality with all its imperfections, Steen consciously developed an easily recognizable trademark for the Dutch art market.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 57 Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting, 177-9.! 58 Anna C. Knaap, “From Lowlife to Rustic Idyll: The Peasant Genre in 17th-Century Dutch Drawings and Prints,” Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin, Vol. 4, No. 2, (1996): 38. 59 Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting, 183-4. 60 Knaap, “From Lowlife to Rustic Idyll: The Peasant Genre in 17th-Century Dutch Drawings and Prints,” 43. 61 De Vries, Jan Steen: Prinsjesdag, 90.! ! 34! 6. LIFE AND TRAINING OF JAN STEEN

“His paintings are like his way of life and his way of life like his paintings.” –Arnold Houbraken

Looking at the comic characters of Jan Steen, it appears that he brought back the artistic worlds of Hieronymus Bosch and . Between them and Steen, who started painting around 1650, are a few generations. Steen also brought back the subject of children a generation after Jan Miense Molenaer, and Adriaen van Ostade. In that period of time, much had changed in painting. Depicting scenes of everyday life had become increasingly popular, and with adding various degrees of realism, it became more and more difficult to discover what morality was hidden in the pictures; especially in the works of

Steen’s contemporaries such as Frans van Mieris or Gabriel Metsu. Compared to them,

Steen’s paintings are open books, which are deeply rooted in the sixteenth-century subjects and proverbs. Borrowing compositions, motives, styles, and other technical aspects of painting from works by other painters was a common practice for artists in the seventeenth- century Holland. In the highly competitive art market of the northern Netherlands, painters were regularly adapting ideas from their contemporaries in order to improve on them. This was not limited to the local community, but also included the art produced outside their own city walls.1

The circle, in which Steen lived, was rich in types, but poor in elegant appearances. It suited him, because it allowed him to remain close to what was perceived in reality. Steen combined contemporary styles with striking stage-like elements. He was the Bredero among the painters, a folk painter, making allusions and jokes, which the bourgeoisie, to which he belonged, understood.2 Steen showed the joyful and the warm side of society; the cheerful

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Kloek, Een Huishouden van Jan Steen, 2. 2 Ibid., 23-25.! ! 35! homes and inns, the fairs and happy peasants, the visit of the doctor and playful children. In despite of questionable behaviors that take place particularly in his household paintings, there is a sense of optimism and a continuous permanent good mood. Besides his humor and laughter, Steen’s works also show great sensitivity and tenderness that appealed to people. His clientele mostly consisted of city burghers and the aristocracy in and around

Leiden.3 Steen worked for both the market and commissioners. He continually repainted certain subjects, such as The Doctor’s Visit, which he painted at least seventeen times. He painted As the Old Sing many times as well, but each time with considerable variations.4 The many versions of peasant weddings and doctor’s visits are explained by their popularity and demand, even outside The Netherlands and during his lifetime. In 1650 his Peasant Wedding was sold in Denmark, and in 1651 a Swedish field marshal bought four paintings by Steen.5

Thus repetition of certain subjects and themes was the result of success, and the need to satisfy the buyers’ demands. But Steen did not simply repaint the same pictures; he reinvented the genre narratives each time.

With little concern for aesthetic effects, Steen chose ordinary scenes with ordinary people.6 Thus, he has been often thought as a specialist in genre and humorous scenes of everyday life. However, the number of subjects he painted begs the question of whether

Steen specialized in anything. By the same token, one can argue that Steen specialized in painting children, in an unprecedented way, which makes him, arguably, the greatest painter of children in the Dutch Golden Age. All considered, reusing old ideas in a new way was

Steen’s specialization. He even drew on his own work, and kept reinventing his popular pictures. Of course Steen looked at other people’s works. It was a part of the process of becoming a painter. Karel van Mander advised young painters to look at the works of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3!Kloek, Jan Steen: 1626-1679, 20.! 4 Ibid., 28.! 5 Ibid., 19. 6!Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, 41.! ! 36! famous masters, suggesting that “one can make very good paintings from carefully handled stolen ingredients.”7 Steen borrowed ideas from his exemplars, but very quickly he was able to free himself from them and create his new variations with new motifs and elements.

Steen’s quality of work varies greatly, from highly exquisite to average to even disappointing.

But even his lesser works tell interesting amusing stories with clever points to them. A good storyteller such as Steen, did not need explanatory text to make his work understood, though he used this device as a backup literary piece. Literature and painting were, according to the seventeenth-century art theory, equivalent sisters. Just like the words of a poet evoked images, a good genre picture suggested a story. Even Arnold Houbraken, one of Steen’s harshest critics, complimented him by saying that everything in his genre scenes was so well understood.8 The very richness and diversity of Steen’s pictures makes it possible to select different works for examining his works.

The development of Steen’s work has much to do with his life. Jan Havickszoon Steen was born in 1625 or 1626 in Leiden, to a brewer father. A lot of facts about his life are yet to be established. Diligently done archival research by Dr. Bredius, informs us in notarial facts about Steen’s marriage, baptism of his children, the brewery, and his membership at the

Guild of St. Luke in Leiden. These tedious works have made it possible to reconstruct Steen’s life, and these data do not support the stories that the biographers have told of Steen.9 As to which artists Steen must have seen, we have a large number of masters. Two types of artists had influenced Steen: those who had a direct impact on him, and those who inspired him in a more general way. For instance, a number of pictures within picture by Frans Hals and

Rubens, or a chimneypiece copied after French examples, are simply works that Steen quoted. But with artists such as Bruegel and Van Ostade, Steen shared common subjects.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 7 Kloek, Jan Steen (1626-1679), 62-63. 8 De Vries, Jan Steen: Prinsjesdag, 40. 9 De Jonge, Een Reeks Monografieen̈ over Hollandsche en Vlaamsche Schilders, 5.! ! 37! Steen knew Bruegel’s themes from the engravings. He knew the kermises, peasant weddings, children’s games, proverbs, and village schools. Subjects like As the Old Sing and

The Twelfth Night of Jacob Jordaens, tavern scenes of Adriaen Brouwer, and inn dancings of

Van Ostade, all inspired Steen and left lasting impressions on him.10 Steen’s Tooth Puller of

1651, only three years after Van Ostade’s version, shows how differently Steen had envisioned the same subject. Steen had tendency to enhance the narrative rather than develop the established scenes. In comparison to Van Ostade, Steen’s figures are brought to the foreground, move more theatrically, and have livelier facial expressions.11

It is thought that Steen trained in Haarlem, in the workshop of the brothers Adriaen and .12 That is what Weyerman writes, but it should be noted that his book was not published until 1729, when Steen’s life was already shrouded in mystery and gossip.

Admittedly Steen's early Village Weddings do seem in the style and subject matter of

Adriaen van Ostade. However, the village wedding theme had been made famous a century ago by Bruegel. Steen simply elaborated on it and elevated the social status of the attendees. He continued to look for different styles and subjects in different towns.

Weyerman also reports that Steen studied with Nicolaes Knüpfer in Utrecht, and Houbraken says he was a pupil of Van Goyen in The Hague, where he began his career and married the daughter of Van Goyen in 1649. A year earlier he had enrolled as a master painter in the artists’ guild in Leiden, where he was appointed as a guardian to minors. This suggests that he had completed his apprenticeship in 1648. 13 Steen gradually developed into a full- fledged genre painter by 1650, by painting landscapes and comic scenes in the styles of

Isaack van Ostade and Pieter Bruegel respectively. Then he comes surprisingly with his first

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 10 Kloek, Jan Steen (1626-1679), 70-71. 11 Chapman et la., Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, 69. 12 De Vries, Jan Steen: Prinsjesdag, 14-16. 13 Kloek, Jan Steen (1626-1679), 13.! ! 38! dated ambitious work, The Village Wedding of 1653 (Fig. 20). It was not until around 1660 that he found his own manner of style.14

To find his niche in the market, Steen focused on humor, and was inspired by

Netherlandish tradition of comic art, popularized by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.15 But due to his travels and diverse background, Steen’s style is a combination of Leiden, Delft, and Haarlem elements. The work of Delft masters like and Johannes Vermeer, who captured the intimacy and atmosphere of the interior, date from after Steen’s stay in Delft.

Therefore they cannot have had an influence on Steen. It then must have been the likes of

Carel Fabritius, Gerard Houckgeest, and Emanuel de Witte, with whom Steen probably had some contact in Delft.16 In Leiden, the fijnschilders like Frans van Mieris, Gabriel Metsu, and

Gerrit Dou, were particularly important in Steen’s development. The refined manner of The

Toilet (Fig. 21) and its tendency towards symbolism, is an example of Steen’s Leiden style.

However, that influence gradually faded, and his touch became freer and looser, similar to that of the Haarlem masters. There, Steen is bound to have known the husband and wife painters Jan Miense Molenaer and Judith Leyster. There are thematic parallels in their works, in particular in the depictions of children.17

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 14 Kloek, Jan Steen (1626-1679), 12. 15 Chapman et la., Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, 16. 16 Kloek, Jan Steen (1626-1679), 14. 17 Ibid., 16-17.! ! 39! 7. THE PUZZLE OF MOLENAER

“I describe the follies of some people in a ridiculous manner.” -Gerbrand Adriaensz Bredero

Jan Miense Molenaer's date of birth is not documented, but he would have been born in around 1610. Nothing is known about his training either, however, we know that he paid membership fees to the Guild of St. Luke in Heemstede in 1634. Molenaer’s first paintings are dated 1629, an early period marked by lively colors and large figures that occupy most of the picture surface. In 1636 he married the painter Judith Leyster, who gave birth to four children. Molenaer's increased output after marriage presumably means that he sold well, while Leyster devoted herself to buying and selling art. Sources indicate that Molenaer’s story and career does not differ much from the majority of his contemporaries, who made a living selling their works in the art market, and by commission. Molenaer can be said to be one of the most creative painters of his generation. He introduces to us himself and his family in a group picture (Fig. 22) now housed in in Haarlem, where he was born, raised, and trained.1 Striking similarities in the facial features of the figures in the painting suggest that they are members of his family. Moreover, the inventory of his possessions documents that he had depicted group portraits of his family members.2 It is therefore plausible to assume that Steen not only was influenced to paint children by looking at Molenaer’s work, but also was inspired to use his own family as models and for character study, as opposed to directly copying figures from Molenaer.

The genius of Molenaer has long been overshadowed by the fame of his wife, Judith

Leyster, who is the seventeenth century’s best-known Dutch female artist. Molenaer’s early genre paintings, scenes of peasant life, and portrayals of playful children, are important key

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, 2. 2 Ibid., 3.! ! 40! links between Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Jan Steen. Like Steen, Molenaer was interested in the tradition of sixteenth-century humorous paintings, but many of the pictures that he created were poorly executed, which are not regarded as significant works in the history of

Dutch art. Molenaer painted a variety of themes from pastoral landscapes to tavern revels, but the majority of his paintings are in the comic mode. This may have been driven by demand, because several collectors and art sellers, who owned Molenaer’s works, had a distinct preference for his comic pictures. In particular, his tronijkens (little faces) were highly valued. These were single-figure, bust-length paintings of models in costume with comic expressions, although they could sometimes be serious and elegant. Example of this is his series of children representing the five senses (Fig. 23). The inventory of Molenaer’s estate taken after his death in 1668 lists several smiling figures of children by Frans Hals. These paintings, such as the Laughing Boy (Fig. 24), were of great importance in forming

Molenaer’s and Leyster’s interests in painting cheerful children.3 He also owned paintings by

Lucas van Leyden, Adriaen Brouwer, Bruegel, and Adriaen van de Venne, all of whom shaped the comic character of Molenaer’s work.

By the late 1620s, specialization had begun to develop in the competitive Dutch art market. For many artists, producing paintings in one unique fashion that would sell was a secure way, rather than experimenting in all styles. Haarlem, a town with a tradition of humorous paintings and peasant scenes, which was a legacy of the immigrations from the late sixteenth-century Antwerp (Frans Hals, Adriaen Brouwer), became the center of comic specialization in Holland.4 Thus, for Molenaer the foundations were already laid down, but his lively figures of peasants and children were more versatile than those of his exemplars.

His added innovation and contribution to the available pictorial motifs helped Haarlem become the preeminent center for comic genre, and paved the path for the likes of Jan

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, 51. 4 Ibid., 53.! ! 41! Steen and Cornelis Dusart. Moleaner’s production during his stay in Amsterdam focuses mainly on peasant scenes, and though it was a new niche in the city, these works pale in comparison to his Haarlem works. 5 Furthermore, pictures made for the art market in

Amsterdam were meant to be sold, rather than to explore iconography and charged motifs, which had begun to lose their popularity by mid-century.6 Therefore, this paper intends to pay closer attention to his paintings done before 1640.

During the time when theatrical farces were censored as unfit for an audience divided by religion, politics, wealth, gender, and age, comic images allowed for a wider divisive material to be presented to a broader and diverse audience.7 The element of laughter in

Molenaer’s pictures is rooted in literary comedy, but scenes of irrational behavior were more open to interpretations than literary or theatrical comedies, and helped the middle- and upper-class to justify and secure their higher status.8 Dutch painters, such as Frans Hals and

Molenaer, used stage characters, rather than the play itself, to build their own scenes. As a result, Molenaer’s paintings are not mysterious. His subjects are presented to the viewer with no hidden symbolism, only with enough details to assist the interpretation of the painting.

Unlike Steen, who overloaded the scenes with details to stimulate our imagination and played a guessing game with the viewer, Molenaer’s pictures are plain and simple. He does not try to deceive us by twisting the story, instead he very often hands us the key to the meaning. Because of the easy-to-understand nature of Molenaer’s paintings, he did not have to use inscriptions to give paintings a narrative, something that Steen had to do sometimes.

As a result, Molenaer’s paintings can be enjoyed in silence, and do not have to be discussed about.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 5 Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, 4. 6 Ibid., 165. 7 Vanhaelen, Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam: Gender, Childhood and the City, 58. 8 Chapman et la., Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, 115.! ! 42! Molenaer’s absorption of the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century comic paintings was later taken up and revised by Jan Steen from the early 1650s on through the

1670s.9 They both treated certain subjects involving youth, such as children teasing cats, or children smoking and drinking in a . Steen’s differentiated gestures and physiques for recognizable social types, namely the peasants, accorded with standard repertoire, which suggest that he looked at Molenaer’s examples, which were in turn based on the works of Bruegel and Brouwer.10 Molenaer’s paintings explicitly mock the rural people and their children. The distorted postures and shrewdness of his children makes them look untrustworthy. The diminished tonal range and the open-mouthed grins in Molenaer’s children indicate a lack of civilized self-control and impoliteness. On the contrary, Steen’s chaotic households often show the urban families with their children, who, although may act in questionable ways, are the only truth tellers in the picture.

Steen’s debts to Molenaer are largely in the Bruegelian themes, and not so much the inclusion of children in the paintings. Although relatively small in number, the existence of drawings by Molenaer separates him from his corresponding artists such as Frans Hals and

Steen, to whom we can attribute by certainty only none and two drawings respectively. None of Molenaer’s, nor Steen’s drawings served as preparatory study for child types.11 In addition, most of Molenaer’s sketches represent village merrymakers, dating to the early 1640s, after he had moved from Haarlem to Amsterdam. At that point he had become a peasant genre painter, and this period is irrelevant and beyond the framework of this research. Only two drawings can be dated to his Haarlem days, but they, too, represent peasants. Going through the archival records of both Steen and Molenaer at the Netherlands Institute for Art

History in The Hague, no one similar drawing, sketch, or finished painting of a child was

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9 Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, 52. 10 Ibid., 56.! 11 Dennis P. Weller, “The Drawings of Jan Miense Molenaer,” Master Drawings, Vol. 45, No. 2 (2007): 147.! ! 43! found to indicate that the children in the works of Steen would have been directly, and in a conscious way, based on his predecessor’s examples.12

While both Molenaer’s and Steen’s paintings reflect their interest in the Bruegel revival, their dependence on the peasants and robust figures also reflects the work of other artists active in the Northern Netherlands, amongst them David Vinckboons, Pieter Quast, and Hendrik Potuyl. 13 Because of this extended network of sources, who were all interconnected with one another and influenced each other back and forth, assessing possible sources contributing to Steen’s portrayal of children must only be done in general terms. Although a number of paintings by both artists focus on similar genre imagery involving children, their works do not share many stylistic and compositional features, and

Molenaer does not appear to have exerted any huge influence on Steen, other than sparking the initial inspiration. Both artists developed largely as independent and innovative masters, who although building on the customs, eventually forged their own styles. Since the convention already existed, Steen and Molenaer reconciled their interests in the comic genre with ideas generated by their predecessors and contemporaries. Thus, Molenaer’s children did not influence Steen in a stylistic way; they merely introduced him to the topic. Because of the uncertainty that still surrounds the oeuvre of Molenaer, only those works currently attributed to him according to the RKD, have been considered for this research.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 12 Research at the RKD, Netherlands Institute of Art History archives, June 2014. 13 Weller, “The Drawings of Jan Miense Molenaer,” 151.! ! 44! 8. DIFFERENCES IN CHILDREN

“The world is a stage. Each plays his role and gets his share.” –Joost van den Vondel

Since the sixteenth century, children had sometimes been substituted for an adult in the

Netherlandish paintings. This enabled painters to approach serious moral issues in a light- hearted way.1 Both Molenaer and Steen turned to the world of children to find amusement and excitement. Steen used children as imitators of their elders’ behavior, while in

Molenaer’s pictures, despite the indications that the children are imitating adult behavior, the absence of their elders makes the pictures curiously different from those of Steen.

Molenaer favored close-up views of half-length figures behind the picture plane, isolated against a neutral background.2 The absence of adults in Molenaer’s paintings makes the sheer joy of childhood become the reason for their excitement. Their continual movement is the result of their joyous, carefree nature of being children. To capture the essence of childhood, Molenaer painted with a spontaneous brushwork, something that he had learned from Frans Hals. They are ordinarily dressed, but wearing fantastical hats, and are sometimes making music.3 This evidence amounts to the fact that the children in Molenaer’s paintings are performing a theatrical comedy. Steen’s children, on the other hand, do not wear headdress props, and seem like ordinary contemporary young boys and girls, some of whom are likely to have been his own children.

Jan Steen grew at home, as the eldest of eight children. An average household in the seventeenth-century Holland consisted of five people. In the big cities families were even smaller. Therefor, the large family in which Steen lived, was an exception, and provided him

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Welu, Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World, 244. 2 Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, 67. 3 Welu, Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World, 197.! ! 45! with an excellent opportunity to observe the behaviors of children younger than himself.4

Instead of hiring models, many painters relied on family members. However, having to study in their own home and studio had its limitations. A relative, neighbor or staff was not a paid model who would be ready to perform and take the desired posture for the artist. But it also had advantages. It allowed the painter to observe them in prolonged settings, during natural situations. The practice has enabled us to identify certain painters’ works solely based on the reoccurrence of the same model in their paintings. Steen is known to have painted his parents, his father, his two wives and his children. Their names have been given in documents related to the paintings. As a supportive element to the argument of this paper, children in Steen's paintings seem to have been drawn from life. Steen had deliberately sought this effect, since his main study was the reality of his immediate surroundings. On the contrary, children in Molenaer’s paintings seem to have posed, which is more reminiscent of what was common in the studios, than what the painter could see in everyday-life.5

One of Steen’s early devices was to include a landscape in the composition, sometimes with the addition of two or three figures in the middle near a tree. Although the scenery was only secondary to the proposed action in the picture, the composition placed the emphasis on the outdoor, with a view to a distant horizon. Steen later echoes this type of composition onto large interiors inhabited by a larger number of people, who indulge in joy and humor. This is in complete contradiction to the Molenaer’s work, which consisted of close-up large figures in confined interiors. Furthermore, by assigning specific tasks, Steen makes the children stir the narrative. In Luxury Beware (Fig. 25), shows an asleep mother, while a little boy smokes a pipe and an older girl steals from the pantry while at the same time watching the violin player behind the drinking young couple. Here, Steen has strikingly described the word of caution in painting by giving significant roles to children, who, by !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4 Welu, Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World, 62.! 5 Giltaij and Peter Hecht, Senses and Sins: Dutch Painters of Daily Life in the Seventeenth Century, 93.! ! 46! doing so, distance themselves from any children Molenaer ever painted. The variations of this theme are the paintings, which bear the slogan As the Old Sing, so Pie the Young. Steen treated this subject more than ten times, and there are always joy and humor that passes through the infinite visions of Steen’s narrative style. It is as if precisely the participation of the children in these pictures inspired Steen’s other compositions, for he seems to have found something precious in the life and the games of children. To this we owe a number of masterpieces, none of which bears resemblance to Molenaer’s work.

Steen’s children are part of, and related to the subject he painted, and are rarely individual subjects. They are part of a bigger picture, in which they are important actors.

Molenaer’s children, on the other hand, are the big picture and everything else, if there is any, is secondary. Commonly the children in Steen’s works serve to attract the eye of the viewer, as if they were in a performance. The curtain in The Life of Man (Fig. 27) makes it clear that this is not a real inn interior, but that the scene is staged. A detail that does not immediately strike the eye, is the boy who blows a bubble in the attic. Although kids blowing bubbles was a well known metaphor for the shortness of life, the way Steen has concealed the child in the corner of the painting, makes the style uniquely his. In this case, the boy does not even attract the viewers’ attention at first glance, but still he is the one, of all the figures in the painting, to convey the message. The task given to the boy in a complex and crowded composition such as this picture, sets Steen entirely apart from Molenaer, and lays grounds for rejecting the hypothesis that Steen’s children were directly inspired by Molenaer. Steen’s family oriented pictures such as The Twelfth Night, are in fact more in debt to Jacob

Jordaens, than to Molenaer.6

In addition to the intimate family feasts, the schools scenes provided Jan Steen with even more opportunity to perceive children in all their actions. In the Village School in !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 6 Sutton and Butler, “The Life and Art of Jan Steen,” 78. ! 47! Dublin, the master has fallen asleep while the children are free to play to their hearts’ content. In the foreground a boy has fallen asleep, tired of the work that he has to do. An elderly woman makes some effort to keep a few of the children in control, but mischief reigns over the classroom, and one of the boys takes away something from the closet to the amusement of his friends. The genius of Steen's brush in this rich painting has given us an infinite number of details and independent situations that add up to make one fascination story. The variety of children and uniqueness of each figure rejects any claims that Steen might have copied the types for the children.7 On the contrary, it tells us how Steen saw the children, some of whom his own, play around him in real life. As it is hard to ask a child to sit or stand in an unnatural position and hold on to a gesture for a prolonged session, he must have often painted them spontaneously. He painted all these children in so many different paintings, yet it is hard to find two alike. In crowded scenes such as the above-mentioned picture, the Haarlem connection is all over the design. Such compositions were trademarks of Adriaen van Ostade, but it only proves the contact Steen had with the Haarlem painters, because in the portrayal of the children, the conception is completely his own. He never lavishly copied the works of his Haarlem colleagues. Rather, he made innovative variations in which he combined elements taken from Molenaer and Van Ostade, with those invented by himself. As a result, Steen’s children do not share similar figure types and settings with those of Molenaer.

The children in Molenaer’s settings are of a different social class. They are also older than Steen’s children, such as the figures in Two Boys and a Girl Making Music (Fig. 27), who seem to be in the period between childhood and adolescent, which we can call youth. Their peasant nature and the simple things that amuse them, is to teach young viewers a moral lesson. Follies of love and other warnings to the youth, indicates that these paintings were

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 7 Jonge, Een Reeks Monografieen̈ over Hollandsche en Vlaamsche Schilders, 44. ! 48! directed towards the youth, and not the adults, as was the case for Steen. Thus, Molenaer’s children, though generally older than Steen’s children, ironically provide the moralizing viewpoint of the earlier stages of life in the variety of ages he depicts among the youth.8 The urban families who purchased comic paintings, were already familiar with proper etiquettes, and hence it is unlikely that they hung these pictures just as warnings against inappropriate behavior. The paintings must have functioned as entertainment, and to distance the peasants represented in the pictures from the upper-class viewers.9 Therefore, the images of children in Molenaer’s paintings may have helped to educate city children about differences between them and the children in the countryside. In Steen’s representations, however, many of the children are as refined as urban children.

Like Molenaer, Steen must have also been familiar with Lucas van Leyden, who used a jester for the role of commentator. Steen gave this role to the children, and introduced them as commentators on the absurdity of the grown-ups’ world.10 By developing this innovative way of storytelling, which also includes his own comic-role character, Steen differentiated himself artistically from Molenaer and the rest of his contemporaries. In Molenaer’s Boys with a Dwarf (Fig. 28), there are no didactic messages given. The painter has offered standard cues of comedy, such as the village inn, the dwarf, and the laughing children, to indicate that the picture should be seen as funny.11 For the sake of a fair comparison, we could choose a

Steen picture where children are the main storytellers, such as The Merry Family (Fig. 29).

The young kids here, although mischievous and naughty, appear to prompt viewers to judge upon their behavior, not to laugh along with them, as is the case with Molenaer’s picture.

Molenaer’s Broad-grinned children do not attempt to break the so-called fourth wall; rather, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 8 H. Rodney Nevitt, Art and the Culture of Love in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 155. 9 Klaske Muizelaar and Derek Phillips, Picturing Men and Women in Dutch Golden Age: Paintings and People in Historical Perspective (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 128. 10 Kloek, Jan Steen: 1626-1679, 67-68. 11 Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, 43.! ! 49! they stay on the stage, whereas Steen’s children have a more psychological connection with the viewer. They are not as incorrigible as the children in Molenaer’s paintings. By inserting the child as the moralizing teacher in the picture, Steen transformed the comic art to something all his own.

! 50! 9. DISTORTED REALITIES

“Trust not to appearances.” –Jacob Cats

The stadhoulders and princes of Orange lacked the financial resources available in France or

England. Also, unlike the Catholic Church that commissioned works in Italy, the Reformed

Church in the Dutch Republic was not a patron of art. The market for the “low-life” pictures came from that part of society, which had the money to purchase art, yet was low enough in the social scale to be free from the classicist norms of the elite citizens. In a way, the style and content of genre painting was dictated by this middle class, to which a portion of prosperous peasants, and the artists themselves also belonged. Thus, the artists aimed within their own social class; those who could spend on art, but were not wealthy enough to buy the Italianate works of the Utrecht school or the Flemish baroque, favored by the ruling oligarchies.1 The alienation of the wealthy class from the Dutch native art meant that painters had to find a market within the middle and lower middle classes. Most painters continued to paint what they had learned as apprentices, as it was not feasible to do rapid changes in style to adapt to the taste of a few wealthy patrons.2 Thus, the Dutch artists produced works, which would sell in a market that was large and relatively cheap, paintings that could be hung in the living room of the middle class. For this sector of society, a pleasant picture would be that drawn from human experiences, one that demonstrated the beauty of ordinary life. This in effect, created tendency towards specialization in styles that could sell best without competition from other artists.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Price, Culture and Society in the Dutch Republic During the 17th Century, 120-122. 2 Ibid., 131-2.! ! 51! In the seventeenth century, genre was still unknown as a painterly term, until a century later writer Denis Diderot introduced the term. 3 There was no fundamental difference between history and genre painters, even though there was, in practice, a distinction. In both cases, the artist had to be able to display a perfect story through character relationships. A genre picture is essentially a realistic looking scene of something everyday-life. It started in the sixteenth century, when Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel went for the treatment of scenes of daily life as their main subjects. That was something new and revolutionary, and almost unthinkable in the 1500s, when virtually everything painted had a religious function.4

In the narrative genre, the viewer can understand the story by seeing how the characters interact with one other. The painter makes the message clear by the looks, facial expressions, postures and gestures of his figures. By around 1600, specialization in art had developed in the Netherlands. Dutch realism of the seventeenth century derived from direct visual experiences of the painter’s own surroundings, whereas the realism of the sixteenth century was highly stylized. Until recently it was believed that realism was the main characteristic of the Dutch art, although, the Dutch painters have not done reliable distinction between the reality of their genre pieces and everyday reality of their time.

Nowadays it is increasingly doubted that the so-called pictures of reality were snapshots of life. Instead, it is widely accepted that the genre pictures often had a moralistic slant, though in many cases that assumption is a bit exaggerated.

To consider a picture as “real-looking” depends highly on cultural and social factors.

Even within the same century, the realism of Steen differed fundamentally from Vermeer’s. In comic painting, the required realism could be attained in different pictorial ways. The realism of Molenaer’s comics depended on stereotypes and recognizable character flaws.

Molenaer’s children acknowledge this essential theatrical character of comic realism. Steen

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, 42. 4 Kloek, Een Huishouden van Jan Steen, 17.! ! 52! had a different approach to realism. He imitated the perception of daily life by carefully assembling a scene of disorder with all of its randomness and incidental details, while the children were a natural part of this disarray that makes life not perfect. There is also disorder in Molenaer’s compositions, however, it is in the grouping of figures crammed into the scene, or posed in disconnected fashion. In particular, Molenaer’s children appear to be in an unpremeditated state, as if the painter had painted a random scene without having planned it beforehand. This effect, which highlights the impression of a moment witnessed, is one of the fundamental differences between the children in the works of Molenaer and

Steen. In Steen’s works, the messiness of the household, and the ill-behaving adults are indeed caught in a snapshot of a moment in life, but the children are fully aware of being painted and act according to the scenario. Molenaer’s representations of disorderly posed children must have required an abundance of bodily studies, while Steen’s children seems to have been drawn from observing ordinary children at play.5 In terms of styles, Molenaer’s rough manner, which evokes coarse behavior and bad temper, never looked realistic in the smooth sense of , while Steen occasionally matched that slick surface of the

Leiden school, when he wanted.

Once Steen decided to tackle the comic genre, he took cues from the theater. His narrator was sometimes a child, usually looking straight at the viewer, breaking the fourth wall between the picture and the audience. In a traditional three-walled theater stage, the fourth wall is the name given to the imaginary wall at the front, through which the audience sees the action. One of the standard stock characters of comic theater was the actor who came out of his role during the play, and addressed, or acknowledged the audience directly through this boundary. The breaking of the imaginary fourth wall paradoxically undermined the illusion that we are witnessing a real situation, and was a commentary to the audience to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 5!Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, 55.! ! 53! see the comic point of the scene. Sometimes the children in Steen’s pictures have their backs to the viewer, like in The Arrival of the Bride (Fig. 30), but ironically, they still invite the viewer to see.6 This narrator effect is a fundamental factor that sets Steen’s children apart from those of Molenaer. Using the principles of theatrical staging, Molenaer’s children are often situated in a boxy space, and with their close-range, bold presence, they address the viewer with their gaze and gestures, but never really break the fourth wall. For instance, the interaction between the children and the viewer in Merry Company of Children Smoking and

Drinking (Fig. 31), is highly dependent on the artist’s manipulation of gestures, physiognomy, and posture. 7 In several paintings, Molenaer acknowledge the presence of the viewer through a figure peering into the scene from a window. In Merry Company Playing Music

(Fig. 32), in addition to the peering figure in the window, two of the children in the main scene directly address the viewer. This motif, which can be found in some of Steen’s paintings as well, does not break the fourth wall, but actually brings the viewer into the three-walled space. Both devices, however, directly involve the viewer in the moral lesson that is being told.

Molenaer’s innovative use of sharp gestural language, which accord with European conventions of rhetoric, was characteristic of his comic works. Decoding these gestures is important in understanding his pictures. The body language and the extended, sharp gestures in Young Musicians and a Dancing Dwarf (Fig. 33) immediately classify the painting as comic. By placing the rommel-pot player in the foreground, Molenaer has managed to enlarge the figure of the young boy in relation to the other figures, especially that of the dwarf, and to assure the viewer of his role as the storyteller. The portrayal of dwarfs is not normal in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, yet are found in several of Molenaer’s works.

These laughing figures are meant to stress the humorous point of these paintings. Dwarfs

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 6 Kloek, Jan Steen (1626-1679), 33. 7 Welu, Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World, 152. ! 54! were historically portrayed as servants or jesters, symbolizing the concept that man cannot improve upon nature. Furthermore, both types, dwarfs and impoverished youth were standard figures of comic.8 Steen, on the other hand, depended less on body language and the stature of children. In The Merry Family (Fig. 29), the figures of the two children in the foreground are for the most part concealed in their garments. Yet, their actions, and not size, gestures or glances, convey the whole message of the detail-rich painting. In Steen’s pictures, children do not act on their impulses like they do in many of Molenaer’s pictures.

Rather, they indulge in the activities of their adults. By doing so, Steen transforms the pictorial models and standard comic motifs that he had learned from Molenaer into a new type. Children become the commentators in Steen’s pictures. As commentators, they participate themselves in the scene, all the while other figures seem unaware of these little spectators.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 8 De Jonge, Een Reeks Monografieen̈ over Hollandsche en Vlaamsche Schilders, 57.! ! 55! 10. CONCLUSION

“For what is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down.” -Desiderius Erasmus

In art history, besides the history of the artist, the paintings themselves keep fairly hidden lives. In the eighteenth century, all the paintings were privately owned and only a few people could know how a painting by Jan Steen had been like. Hence the stories being told about the paintings would add to the increasing legends about the artist. Public museums were not founded in the Netherlands until the late nineteenth century, and few paintings were hung in churches or public buildings. Paintings like those of Steen were intended for private homes, and like any other goods, paintings had to appeal to the buyers. Early documents confirm that the delightfulness of Steen’s pictures always attracted the audience and were sought after.1 His versatile way of conveying a message disguised in humor, was in such a fashion that any audience would find amusing. In spite of harsh, and biased criticism of Steen’s work, some authors still found him skilled in his own right. The English art dealer John Smith, who is credited for founding a model of catalogue raisonné writing, saw in Steen’s biblical pieces

“total incapacity” to render necessary dignity and expression of characters.2 However, he admitted that in all other respects, Steen’s talents are strikingly evident. For Joshua

Reynolds, the influential eighteenth-century English painter, Steen was a great painter of

“low-life” art.3

Reynolds’ observation of Steen’s mastery in the artist’s own way, even if it was vulgar, proves that Steen was being noticed by the prominent figures in the field of art literature.

Houbraken himself owned one version of Steen’s Marriage of Tobias and Sarah. He found it !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Chapman, ”Jan Steen's Household Revisited,” 183. 2 John Smith, Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters (London: Smith and Son, 1833), 32. 3 Kirschen, The Religious and Historical Paintings of Jan Steen, 19.! ! 56! amusing and regarded it as seeing the occurrence of an actual marriage ceremony.4 It is also noteworthy that the saying, Jan Steen household, which has such a firm place in the modern

Dutch culture, arose from the life and work of Steen. He was a gifted storyteller, who observed human behavior and transformed it onto the canvas under realistic and didactic light, with the use of folklore and verbal traditions. In doing so, he received harsh criticism from his eighteenth-century biographers, but the nineteenth-century scholars, among them

Abraham Bredius, documented a better account of Jan Steen. Like many other artists, Steen had a hard time making a living by painting alone, and had to look for secondary sources for income. However, the sheer number of his artistic production alone is enough evidence that he held himself as a painter and not a brewer or innkeeper.5 We no longer consider the life and work of an artist reflecting one another, and we judge the work of art on its own merits.

Nowadays, museum visitors who enjoy the works of Jan Steen, do so not because they are overwhelmed by a sense of enforced respect for the art, but because they have fun looking at it and they like to point out the funny details in his paintings. The power of Steen’s mixture of reality and popular drama is that, the humor of his paintings still speaks directly to an audience 350 years his junior.

However, the paintings in museums today are separated from their original context, and thus their significance is not what it was originally intended. Some three hundred fifty surviving paintings of Steen have been caught between the iconographic interpretations of

Eddy de Jongh, and the descriptive readings of Svetlana Alper.6 Iconographical methods lead to pinpointing the moralizing lessons in paintings, and ultimately neglect the comic mode. Many non-comic paintings also had moralizing messages hidden in them. Thus implying a didactic message did not require a comic mode. Yet, Steen chose to employ it on

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4 Kirschen, The Religious and Historical Paintings of Jan Steen, 20. 5 Ibid., 22.! 6 Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century, 9. ! 57! an unprecedented scale. Integrating the conventional art historical methods, with an understanding of cultural history of the time, is the best procedure for finding clues as to what pleasures Steen’s pictures provided for his audience. 7 Modern critics have long admired the acute depictions in seventeenth-century Dutch art, but the artist often adjusted themes to create a more appealing setting that would impress the buyers. As a result, although Dutch painters seem to have conveyed reality, the pictures are not true images of the world.8 In spite of the lifelike depictions of Steen’s paintings, it is very unlikely that they were snapshots of real moments in life. Thus, if we can conclude that many of the aspects of his pictures were not every-day scenes of a Dutch household, we can also argue on the same grounds that the acts of the children in those pictures are exaggerated as well. The Dutch, who prospered in the economic boom of the Golden Age, were also concerned about the moral consequences of wealth. A large number of Dutch genre paintings of this period address that concern. Such contemporary social and cultural issues are best understood in the context of the literature of the time, such as Jacob Cat’s writings on marriage and family.9 The eighteenth-century Dutch writers knew the Calvinist instructions on children, and would have interpreted the scenes in Steen’s paintings as actions of immoral adults, reflected by the behavior of children.10 Thus, it is probable to assume that Houbraken, and other early scholars, understood Steen’s children as a means by which the artist was mocking and criticizing the parents. However, children seem to have not yet been of major sociological significance to receive separate analysis. Hence, for the majority of early authors and critics of Steen, the children are simply parts of a larger genre picture.

A great deal of the seventeenth-century Dutch paintings have been labeled as

“genre” by the nineteenth and twentieth-century art experts. The iconological method, in !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 7 Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century, 11. 8 Mariët Westermann, Worldly Art: The Dutch Republic 1585-1718 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 7. 9 Ibid., 119. 10 Ibid., 503.! ! 58! spite of its achievements in unlocking certain motifs and symbols, has proved to be a limited approach in reading such pictures, and does not cover the content and form of a work of art.

The method’s reliance on text and symbolism distracts us from viewing the image.11 While searching actively for hidden symbols in every inch of the paintings, the emblematic methods of De Jongh and his followers tend to close an eye to the cultural issues, such as the status of the child in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. As a result, the symbols and motifs, not the child or people for that matter, are given a range of cultural significance.12 In a more cultural approach, Simon Schama argues that the Dutch invented the ‘impolite’ image of the mortal child, as opposed to putti and infants in the past. 13 To him, the replacement of putti by naughty children was a new cultural view, and ultimately a new understanding of the follies of the world.14 To acknowledge Steen’s achievements, one must interpret his vision of the world within the context of the seventeenth-century Dutch culture, which children were an essential part of. They were raised and taught during the Golden

Age. How they were raised, and what they were learning, is important in understanding the

Dutch society of that period. Steen’s children radiate that essence of childhood, which everyone, even the modern viewer can see as a reflection of their own early years. On the contrary, Molenaer’s children, such as the one in the Tavern Scene with Farmers (Fig. 34), seem to be part of an illusion, acting out a theatrical piece, for the sake of the amusement of the audience. He is an actor in a set that does not resemble something we could be familiar with from our childhood. On the other hand, Steen’s paintings, whether representations of actual incidents or not, are windows to the past, through which everyone can see glimpses of their own childhood.15

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 11 Jan Baptist Bedaux, The Reality of Symbols: Studies in the Iconology of Netherlandish art 1400-1800 (Rotterdam: Gary Schwartz, 1990), 13. 12 Ibid., 16. 13 Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (New York: Random House, 1987), 479. 14 Ibid., 484.! 15 Degener, Jan Steen, 20. ! 59!

In order to make childhood a phase of life to which everyone could relate to, Steen reduced the gap between the middle-class and peasants, reduced the number of insignificant figures, and instead concentrated on a group of main figures. By doing so, he was able to heighten the expressiveness and physiognomies. All he needed was to throw in some of Molenaer’s children, but that was only conceptual, and his subject matter had a new and unique style. As a result, his children are more of a narrating character than those of

Molenaer, who simply seem as happy-go-lucky without telling a story. Steen’s adult characters use their bodies to express attitudes, however, the children use facial expression.

In Molenaer’s paintings of children that can be compared to Steen, the children are often the only actors in the scene, hence both bodily movements and facial expressions are conveyed by them. Even in those paintings of Steen that feature only children, it is mostly the faces of them that tell us what is going on. Steen made the emotions of children visible through their physiognomy, laughter, cry, or glance, even if some of them are painted painterly and not as close up and detailed as the children in the works of Molenaer. The latters seem either to be acting, or else enjoying a passing moment in time, with no relevant reference to past or future.16

The paintings of Steen often make the impression that they are the result of a spontaneous, almost improvisational method. The remarkable result is that the proportions of the figures fit into the composition. Had they been figure types taken from other artists, it would have created an impression of misplaced figures. Steen must have carefully studied his models, and the variety in the figures of children makes one believe that he should have had regular young models available; namely his own children. Furthermore, Steen was often the main figure in many of his paintings. He could not have possibly prepaid his own sketch from studying other paintings. Even though occasionally one can detect a familiar figure, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 16 Chapman et la., Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, 76.! ! 60! such as the wine pouring man, also painted by Molenaer (Figs. 35 & 15), they are isolated instances, and only show Steen’s knowledge of the Dutch art canon. It may be that by using a standard motif on occasion, he purposedly wanted to showoff his understanding of the art fashion. Aside from such cases, the many figures in his paintings could not all have been prepared from other works. Steen’s detailed work makes it clear that the artist had a good eye for human postures and movements, and painted one child at a time.

Based on the argument above, it seems likely that Steen dispensed with preparatory drawing, and instead painted directly on the canvas.17 Yet, he must have had a repertoire of sample drawings at his disposal, because his work contains many repetitions of the same compositional elements, figures, heads, animals, and props. In some paintings, a comparison of the details makes it clear that one or more models had been observed and drawn from different angles; sometimes from the sides, sometimes from the front or behind. This is similar to drawing sessions at academies, where artists were in a circle around the model, so that each one had a different view of the same pose. Therefore, Steen had, at least sometimes, a model to pose in his studio where he would be outlining the model while moving around in a circle.18 For instance in his Village Wedding series, Steen has painted certain figures in a similar manner.19 However, his children remain fairly unique. When it comes to the figures of children, it does not look as though Steen simply consulted his stock of standard child prototypes. The children could quite possibly have been portrayed as they looked at the time of drawing.

It is believed that Steen used his own family as models. In particular, his son Thaddeus and daughter Eva were likely used as models for children, because we encounter them

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 17 Walsh, Jan Steen: The Drawing Lesson, 14-15. 18 De Vries, Jan Steen: Prinsjesdag, 85. 19 Kloek, Jan Steen: (1626-1679), 54.! ! 61! repeatedly.20 The same children appear to be a little older in later paintings. In a description form 1738, the boy blowing the horn in The Baker Arent Oostwaard and his Wife in

Amsterdam, has identified as a son of Steen. He appears again in The Drawing Lesson21 (Fig.

6). The repetition of the same children at different ages suggests that even if they were not his own children, they were real individuals, whom Steen used as model, and therefore they do not constitute pictorial types related to Molenaer. Perhaps this is proved best by comparing Molenaer’s Interior of a Classroom (Fig. 36) with Steen’s paintings of the same topic, Schoolmaster (Fig. 14) and A School for Boys and Girls (Fig. 37). While Steen clearly must have taken up the subject of school from Molenaer, he placed new pupils in his pictures. In fact, rather than using the child figures in Molenaer’s picture, he referred to his own work. In the Schoolmaster, the boy next to the window is drawn after the boy in The

Drawing Lesson. This boy, the girl, and the youngest boy, reappear in other paintings as well, and must have been Steen’s own children.

As a skillful figure drawer, Steen did not have to resort to earlier study sheets in designing and painting children.22 Steen did paint many versions of certain subjects, but he did not use similarly posed figures in these paintings, which reveals that the painter did not refer to drawn figure studies. Hours of research and comparison between the canons of

Steen and Molenaer at the Art History Archives (RKD) at The Hague, failed to find proof of any similarity in the way of depicting children in the works of the two painters. When painting children, Steen was a free spirit, working based on reality, imagination and creativity. In the catalogues of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century drawings, a number of auctions mention a "figure study” (studieblaatje) by Jan Steen. In addition, chalk drawings of a single figure by him are mentioned. In the famous collection of Ploos van Amstel, which was

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 20 Kloek, Jan Steen: (1626-1679), 27. 21 Ibid., 12. 22 De Vries, Jan Steen: Prinsjesdag, 83.! ! 62! auctioned in 1800, there was also a study sheet with an attribution to Jan Steen. If these drawings were indeed works by Steen, they were probably model studies that did not have any direct associations with any related painting, but which the painter kept as references to human anatomy. Model study was usually drawing from the nude, and was an important element in learning to become an artist. But in practice it was not always possible to find models, especially female ones. Therefore, often a group of painters together hired a model.

This practice was cost-efficient and also less risky for their reputation, because some of the models were prostitutes. More importantly, by practicing together they could help with suggestions and learn from constructive criticism.

All said, Jan Steen was a painter of people, young and old, men and women. He had a great interest in the daily life, human behavior, and traditional jokes. Steen addressed these topics by blurring the boundaries between the world of everyday life and the Northern folk wisdom, which he had learned from prints of Pieter Bruegel’s Netherlandish proverbs.23

To achieve his own style, Steen fused the distinct schools of painting that had developed in different towns of Holland. He mixed the elegant style of Frans van Mieris with the rough- edged peasant scenes of Adriaen van Ostade, and incorporated the monumentality of Jacob

Jordaen’s large canvases. He also learned interior scenes from the Delft school, but genre specialists from his native Leiden seem to have had the greatest influence on him. In The

Hague, the portrait style, which was dependent on the stadhoulders’ court and the entourages of foreign ambassadors, had little mark on Steen.24

Dutch genre paintings can rarely be considered renditions of real life, but they still contain clues relevant to the culture of the time, and have by and large defined the present- day understanding of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Although it is hard to see to what

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 23 Kloek, Jan Steen: (1626-1679), 62-63. 24 Price, Culture and Society in the Dutch Republic During the 17th Century, 168.! ! 63! extent they drew from reality, subjects of genre paintings are rooted deeply in the everyday life of Dutch culture and its concerns. This is best shown in Steen’s pictures that are full of people. Unlike Vermeer, whose people are isolated objects in quiet interiors that speak louder than the people in them, Steen painted active people. However, it can be argued that

Steen did not convey that deep human psychology found in Rembrandt’s portraits. But then again, Steen was not a portraitist, but a humorist, a storyteller with a point to make. His participation in the scenes gives authenticity to the events. The genius of Steen lies in his double identity: his comic double tempts the viewer, while his painter self cautions us.25

Among the many artists who adapted theatrical forms and comedy types, Jan Steen developed a particular style that surpassed all his contemporaries and paved the road for

Antoine Watteau in the eighteenth century.26 Towards the end of his life, French classicism began to influence Steen’s work. Two Men and a Young Woman (Fig. 38) shows this influence.27 After the disaster year of 1672, Steen’s life was never the same. Deep in financial depth, he applied for permission to open an inn in Leiden. Following the death of his first wife, he remarried in 1673. He had six children with Grietje, and his new wife, Maria van

Egmond, added two more to the family. Steen died in his hometown of Leiden in 1679, after a career spanning thirty years.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 25 “Works of the Great Masters: Jan Steen,” 18. 26 Gudlaugsson, The Comedian in the Works of Jan Steen and his Contemporaries, 68-9. 27 Price, Culture and Society in the Dutch Republic During the 17th Century, 157.! ! 64!

CATALOGUE

Fig. 1. Jan Steen, Self-Portrait, c. 1670

Oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Fig. 2. Jan Steen, The Burgher of Delft and His Daughter, 1655

Oil on canvas Private Collection

! 66! Fig. 3. Adrian van Ostade, The Quake, 1648

Etching, Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Fig. 4. Jan Steen, The Toothpuller, 1651

Oil on Panel , The Hague

! 67! Fig. 5a. Jan Steen, Sitting Man with Pipe, c.1648-53

Drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Fig. 5b. Jan Steen, A Player at Skittles, c.1648-53

Drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

! 68! Fig. 6. Jan Steen, The Drawing Lesson, c.1663-65

Oil on panel Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu

Fig. 7. Gerard ter Borch, The letter, c.1660-65

Oil on canvas , London

! 69! Left: Fig. 8a. Jan Steen, detail of The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, 1671

Oil on canvas Private Collection

Right: Fig. 8b. Rembrandt, detail of Abraham banished Hagar and Ishmael, 1637

Etching Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Left: Fig. 9a. Jan Steen, detail of A School for Boys and Girls, c.1670 Oil on canvas, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

Right: Fig. 9b. Raphael, The School of Athens, c.1509-11 Fresco, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City

! 70!

Top: Fig. 10a. Jan Steen, The Egg Dancers, c.1670

Oil on canvas Private Collection

Bottom: Fig. 10b. Rembrandt, detail of Two Women Teaching a Child to Walk, c.1635-37

Drawing British Museum, London ! 71! Fig. 11. Jan Steen, Children Teaching a Cat to Dance, c.1660-79

Oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Fig. 12. Jan Steen, The Feast of St Nicholas, c.1665-68

Oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

! 72! Fig. 13. Gerard ter Borch, Apple Pealer, c.1660

Oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Fig. 14. Jan Steen, The Village School, c.1663-65

Oil on canvas National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

! 73! Fig. 15. Jan Steen, As the Old Sing, so Pipe the Young, c.1668-70

Oil on canvas Mauritshuis, The Hague

Fig. 16. Jan Steen, A Peasant Family at Meal-Time, c.1665

Oil on canvas The National Gallery, London

! 74! Fig. 17. Jan Steen, Easy Come, Easy Go, 1661

Oil on canvas Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Fig. 18. Jan Steen, The Meal, c.1650

Uffizi Gallery, Florence

! 75! Fig. 19. Adriaen van Ostade, Brawl, 1637

Oil on panel Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Fig. 20. Jan Steen, The Village Wedding, 1653

Oil on canvas Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

! 76! Top: Fig. 21. Jan Steen, Woman at Her Toilet, 1663

Oil on panel The Royal Collection, London

Bottom: Fig. 22. Jan Miense Molenaer, Family Portrait of Jan Miense Molenaer, c.1635

Oil on panel Frans Hals Museum

! 77! Fig. 23. Jan Miense Molenaer, The Sense of Smell, c.1630

Oil on panel Private Collection

Fig. 24. Frans Hals, Laughing Boy, c.1625

Oil on panel Mauritshuis, The Hague

! 78! Fig. 25. Jan Steen, In Luxury Beware, 1663

Oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Fig. 26. Jan Steen, The Life of Man, c.1665

Oil on canvas Mauritshuis, The Hague

! 79! Fig. 27. Jan Miense Molenaer, Two Boys and a Girl Making Music, 1629

Oil on canvas National gallery, London

Fig. 28. Jan Miense Molenaer, Boys with a Dwarf, 1646

Oil on canvas Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

! 80! Fig. 29. Jan Steen, The Merry Family, 1668

Oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Fig. 30. Jan Steen, The Arrival of the Bride, c.1650s

Oil on panel Private Collection

! 81! Fig. 31. Jan Miense Molenaer, Merry Company of Children Smoking and Drinking, c.1630-35

Oil on canvas Private Collection

Fig. 32. Jan Miense Molenaer, Merry Company Playing Music, c.1630s

Oil on panel Private Collection

! 82! Fig. 33. Jan Miense Molenaer, Young Musicians and a Dancing Dwarf, c.1630

Oil on canvas SØR Rusche collection

Fig. 34. Jan Miense Molenaer, Tavern Scene with Farmers, c.1640s

Oil on panel Woodner Family Collection

! 83! Left: Fig. 35. Jan Miense Molenaer, Merry Company at the Table, 1629

Oil on canvas Museum Heylshof, Worms

Bottom: Fig. 36. Jan Miense Molenaer, Interior of a Classroom, 1636

Oil on panel Private Collection

! 84!

Top: Fig. 37. Jan Steen, A School for Boys and Girls, c.1670

Oil on canvas, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

Left: Fig. 38. Jan Steen, Two Men and a Young Woman, c.1670-5

Oil on canvas National Gallery, London

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