Over the past five years, if you were willing to do a little traveling, you could have learned an enormous amount about seventeenth-century Northern European painting, right here in the U.S.A. I’m thinking of the astonishing sequence of such exhibitions as the Anthony van Dyck survey in Washington, “The Age of Rubens” in Boston, “Rembrandt, Not Rembrandt” at the Met, and, most recently, the National Gallery’s Johannes Vermeer retrospective, immediately followed by the present study of his compatriot and contemporary, “Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller.”¹ The list reads like the description of an old-style seminar—“Problems in Dutch and Flemish Baroque: Through a close analysis of the work of key artists from a crucial period in the Low Countries’ history, the artists’ formations and influences, individual and shared qualities, both unique and typical of the period, will be revealed and identified.” I’m not being entirely facetious. Good as each of these exhibitions was in itself, the cumulative effect of the series was probably far more enlightening than any one show. Seeing the Steen exhibit hard on the heels of the Vermeer retrospective, for example, intensified its impact and clarified its message. Looking at a large number of Steens while the Vermeer show was fresh in the mind made each of the painters’ particular gifts and achievements transparently evident.

The two painters’ careers overlapped. Steen (1626–79) was six years older than Vermeer but outlived him by four years. Both were Catholics in a proudly Protestant country. A larger and more varied body of Steen’s work has come down to us than of Vermeer’s—Steen seems to have been an altogether more productive and wide-ranging painter—but the principal subject matter of the two artists was, at least superficially, almost identical: scenes of everyday life, ordinary domesticity, familiar occurrences that allude to larger moral issues. There the resemblance ends. Steen, even at his best, lacked Vermeer’s unerring eye for tonality, his unfailing ability to orchestrate nuances of light and color, and his uncanny gift for revealing an ideal, Platonic harmony beneath the randomness of the quotidian. Although Steen’s pictures are less exquisitely constructed, less rationally ordered than Vermeer’s, they lack neither charm nor distinction. And it’s clear that Steen aspired to something quite different from his Delft colleague. His vision of life in seventeenth-century Holland is, in a sense, the flip side of Vermeer’s; he is Dionysus to Vermeer’s Apollo.

In Steen’s paintings, the rather bare, tile-floored rooms, lit by many-paned windows, that serve as settings for Vermeer’s tranquil dramas, are invaded by a gang of unruly children, bibulous adults, and flirtatious youths, a bustling, jostling crew that strews debris, shoves furniture about, and generally shatters the tidiness of Dutch domestic life; an intelligent-looking brown and white spaniel, a regular member of Steen’s troupe, invariably behaves with far greater decorum than most of his human companions. The implacable order and stillness of Vermeer’s interiors, the silence broken only by the tinkling of the virginal or the strumming of a lute, is disrupted by the cheerful chaos of Steen’s raucous families, his cardplayers, his smokers, and his red-faced drinkers. (I’m told that a still-current Dutch expression, “a Jan Steen household,” refers to an untidy home full of noisy children.)

Where Vermeer cultivates restraint and economy, Steen revels in excess.

Where Vermeer cultivates restraint and economy, Steen revels in excess. In contrast to Vermeer’s hermetically sealed, circumscribed, geometrically pure interiors, Steen’s world is less tightly constructed, more open; in his domestic scenes, you can see into the next room, down the hall, and sometimes, even, out the window. Vermeer’s introspective figures and couples exchanging charged glances are replaced, in Steen’s recountings, by crowded groups comprising all ages, each participant apparently engaged in a different activity. I’ve said elsewhere that Vermeer’s best paintings are implied—as opposed to specific–narratives; the moment depicted seems neutral, almost insignificant, yet it reverberates with the past and suggests an infinite number of future possibilities. Steen, on the other hand, spins elaborate yarns, sets them firmly in the present tense, and embellishes them with all sorts of elaborate anecdotal observations. He is as apt to paint the interiors of kitchens or the vine-shaded courtyards of country taverns as he is the reception rooms of respectable bourgeois urban houses, clearly delighting in the excuse such subject matter provides for a wealth of detail. Steen informs you how people supported the grapevines that they cultivated around their doorways, what kind of baskets they used to take chickens to market, what sort of kitchen vessels and flower pots they employed, what kind of containers they drank beer from. You can learn what children played with, how many buttons there were on a working class waistcoat, how hams and sausages were stored in well-supplied kitchens, and what an available but high-priced woman’s bedroom looked like.

Steen’s appetite for the variousness and irregularity of actuality is obvious in the rather unlovely types who populate his canvases. He never sentimentalizes children— many of them, in fact, are what Tennessee Williams called “no-neck monsters”—and he clearly relishes the lumpy noses, jowls, or receding chins of his revellers. His rare attempts at idealization are oddly unconvincing; the beautiful young woman, her elegant, small head perched on a swan neck, who occasionally wanders into Steen’s scenes of high and low life, never seems as convincing as her earthier counterparts. The painter must have realized where his strengths lay. In his quest for the specific, he often cast his family members, himself included, as unglamorized but effective principal actors in even his most unbridled tableaux.

For all their hearty realism, however, Steen’s scenes of domesticity are not simply anecdotal records. Some are elaborate visual puns and jokes, while others illustrate moralizing proverbs that caution against excess and lax living. The Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum’s In Luxury Beware (1663) and the Mauritshuis’s famous As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young (c. 1663–65) seem, at first glance, to be straightforward depictions of rowdy family parties—the former crowded into a coolly lit room full of scattered oddments, the latter packed around a small table. Both take place in similar settings—a room with bare plaster walls, a wide-planked floor, and a tall window at the left. What attracts you first to In Luxury Beware is the painting’s pale, chalky palette and its Brueghel-like, even-handed distribution of relatively small incidents across the entire canvas. (Brueghel’s influence is a pervasive one in Steen’s paintings; entire compositions are based overtly on Brueghel’s motifs while others include figures and poses that approach out-and-out quotation.) Yet you soon discover the discordancies in the composition of In Luxury Beware: a hanging basket of objects that resists common-sense interpretation, a duck perched on a dignified burgher’s shoulder, children running riot, a dog—not the spaniel—eating its fill of the family’s meal, a dissolute young man and a complaisant young woman in a compromising pose front and center, and, oddest of all, a perfectly charming pig who enters the fray and seems to ignore the pretzels strewn on the floor in favor of a full-blown rose.

It turns out that all these engagingly depicted episodes are designed to expose the dangers of a lack of discipline and self-denial. As with so many of Steen’s paintings, however, his pleasure in rendering the very particulars that are to be avoided is so palpable that the admonitory subtext seems (at least to twentieth-century eyes) almost beside the point. Similarly, the message of As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young—roughly, “parents who set a bad example will have rotten kids”—seems less compelling, to modern viewers, than Steen’s fascination with the questionable goings-on. And he takes voluptuous enjoyment in painting the crackling rose-lavender silk skirt and green velvet, fur-trimmed jacket of the flushed blonde woman (a portrait of his wife, the daughter of the painter Jan van Goyen) who extends her wine glass for a refill. That oversized goblet, with its glowing red contents, serves as the picture’s anchor. Everything radiates from it and keys off of it: the red parrot, a red-filled beaker on the window sill, a cap, a sleeve, the upholstery of a chair.

As in almost all of Steen’s pictures, the parts of As the Old Sing are more satisfying than the entirety. Your attention is rewarded if you concentrate on the play of the volumes of the beaker and bottle on the windowsill and the robust pewter-topped jug on the floor against the planes of the setting. It’s exhilarating to discover the tense, harmonious axis formed by the widely spaced, near-mirror images of the wine-pourer and the drinking woman, their outstretched arms tenuously linked by the thin ribbon of cascading wine. But the composition as a whole lacks clarity and unity; overall rhythms are disjunctive, half-hidden figures seem crammed into gaps rather than situated solidly in background space, while elements in the foreground—with the exception, once again, of that dignified brown and white spaniel—often refuse to separate themselves from things meant to be seen as farther away. The whole seems casual, random, a little soft. As a result, you tend to read Steen’s narrative paintings incrementally, as though you were reading a written text, just as you do the complex narrative paintings of the paradigmatic Baroque peintre-philosophe, Nicolas Poussin; but in Poussin’s pictures, a rock-solid architectural structure subsumes even the most elaborate of his moral and didactic conceits, turning complicated conceptual themes into magnificently unified, powerful visual experiences.

The difference between the two approaches is, of course, the difference between quintessentially Northern vernacular anecdote and Italian-influenced French intellectualism, but to bemoan this difference or to look for Poussin’s brand of operatic wholeness in Steen is to miss the point. What his pictures offer is an accumulation of extremely convincing, surprisingly immediate observations, sometimes amusing, sometimes instructive, sometimes ravishing. His intimate exchanges between individuals, telling particulars, and, from time to time, gorgeous passages of painting are still capable of speaking to us directly.

For Steen’s contemporaries, of course, his jokes, salacious asides, and moral messages were immediately legible, in ways that they are not to the great majority of modern viewers. A perceptive catalogue essay by the Dutch scholar Eddy de Jongh addresses the interesting question of how present-day audiences can approach these works. It is possible to unravel allusions, “decode” subtexts, and “unpack” hidden meanings, as historians such as de Jongh have done, but even then, can we ever hope to read these paintings, for all the immediacy we still attribute to them, as they were read in their own day? Not entirely, says de Jongh, pointing out, for example, that what was funny or urgent in 1663 probably isn’t today. (What was hilarious in 1863—or even 1963—may not be, either.) Being aware of Steen’s intentions is enriching, even though they are certainly not what determine the success or failure of his paitings. But, de Jongh cautions, it would be a great pity to regard Steen’s energetic, accomplished pictures only as sociological documents of mores in seventeenth-century Holland.

Fortunately, the curators of the exhibition have provided ample evidence of the breadth of Steen’s reach in their selection. In addition to the familiar scenes of uproarious domestic and tavern life, and the occasional excursion into downright bawdiness, there are a few portraits and self-portraits, genre paintings of great sobriety and tenderness, and paintings of religious subjects. (These last sometimes acknowledge a debt to Rembrandt in their simplified compositions and groupings of large-scale figures, in contrast to Steen’s more usual multiplicity of rather small-scale figures.) There are delightful surprises throughout the show: the Northern afternoon light of the small, enchanting Skittle Players Outside an Inn (c. 1663, National Gallery, London); the virtuoso rendering of a changeant pink and blue silk skirt in the Norton Simon’s Wine is a Mocker (c. 1668–70); the delicious contrasts of a Turkish carpet, a blue velvet cushion, a blue and white porcelain bowl of oranges, and a shimmering rose pink gown in The Wedding of Tobias and Sarah (c. 1671–73, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco). There’s the elegant angle of the shoulders of a young woman seen from the back in an atypically restrained scene of a family at prayer, and the truly bizarre foot of Amnon, kicking his sister Tamar off the premises, in a sumptuously colored little picture from Cologne. And the glimpse into an artist’s studio of the period in the Getty Museum’s fine Drawing Lesson (c. 1663–65) in its splendid period frame.

The essays offer fascinating, often surprising information about being an artist in seventeenth-century Holland.

The catalogue, with contributions by a distinguished roster of Dutch contributors, as well as essays and entries by the show’s international team of curators, examines, as is currently obligatory, how Steen was perceived in the past, and what aspects of his work were valued most highly, when. This is complemented by a scrupulously researched chronology of the artist’s career, which acts as an illuminating gloss on an eighteenth-century life of Steen. The essays offer fascinating, often surprising information about being an artist in seventeenth-century Holland. Little is known, for example, about Steen’s early years and education as an artist, but he came to enjoy a considerable reputation as a painter. The grandson of a successful grain merchant, the son of a brewer, and the son-in-law of a celebrated artist, Steen seems to have tried to flourish in both the world of art and of business, although an attempt to run a brewery apparently failed (afterwards, he is said to have devoted himself entirely to painting). Why and how he became a painter at all seems to be a mystery. His biographers stress that he came from a cultured, middle-class household and that drawing instruction would have been part of an all-around humanistic education, but they ultimately fall back on the assumption that someone must have pointed out to Steen’s father that the boy had talent.

In his catalogue essay, Lykle de Vries notes, provocatively, that at the time Steen would have been ready to take his place in the family business, the Dutch brewing industry was experiencing serious problems, so that improbable as it seems, painting could have offered a stable, if expedient career. “Brewing and painting were to play a permanent role in Steen’s life story,” de Vries announces, pointing out that the evident inconsistency, technical problems, and overt derivativeness of the painter’s early work suggest a less than thorough training. Whatever questions they leave unanswered, the catalogue texts bring vividly to life the challenges faced by modern-day art historians in their attempts to come to grips with the culture that produced the works they study, not the least being the frequent unreliability of their predecessors; the piece by Steen’s eighteenth-century biographer Arnold Houbraken, however, is entertaining. Other essays deal with Steen’s narratives, his sources, including his probable interest in theatrical conventions of the day, and the relation of his work to Dutch painting in general. (There’s also a highly technical, rather plodding section on Steen’s techniques and methods.) In Washington, a small, choice exhibition of Northern genre prints from the National Gallery’s own collections, installed adjacent to the main event, documents the evolution of Steen’s lusty tradition and demonstrates his debt to such masters as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas van Leyden, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and Rembrandt, as well as the independence of his own inventions. As I said, American museums have provided a wonderful introduction to seventeenth-century painting in Flanders and Holland over the past few years. Editor’s note: We wish to call attention to the recent publication of Fame & Folly by Cynthia Ozick (Knopf, $26), portions of which first appeared in The New Criterion.

Notes
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