Jan Steen

The funniest painter in the Dutch Golden Age and, in the opinion of connoisseurs from Reynolds and Hogarth onward, one of the most technically accomplished. Steen was born in Leiden, trained probably under Jan van Goyen (whose daughter he married), and spent his working life between Leiden, The Hague, Delft and Haarlem. He ran a bakery and later, in Leiden, a tavern — a fact his contemporaries found wonderfully appropriate, since his scenes of domestic disorder, tavern life, drunken company and moral weakness seem to come from intimate knowledge of their subject. The moralising reading of his work is traditional: 'a Jan Steen household' became a Dutch proverb for cheerful domestic chaos, and many of his compositions include an admonitory figure or a written motto in the lower corner — the scene of debauchery is also an emblem of the consequences of vice. But the moralising is inseparable from the delight; Steen paints the pleasures he is ostensibly criticising with evident relish, and the viewer who follows the argument from the joke to the lesson back to the joke again is being engaged as intelligently as by any Dutch painter of the period. He was also a superb technician: his paint surfaces are rich and sensuous, his spatial organisation sophisticated, his portrayal of multiple figures in different states of consciousness — drunk, entranced, asleep, outraged — consistently inventive. He painted nearly eight hundred works, an enormous output for the period. They circulated widely through the print trade in subsequent centuries and influenced Hogarth's narrative series directly. His prices remained high in the English and Dutch markets throughout the 18th and 19th centuries; major holdings are in the Mauritshuis, the Rijksmuseum and the Wallace Collection.