!
CHILDREN OF THE GOLDEN AGE
JAN STEEN AND THE PORTRAYAL OF YOUTH
!CHILDREN OF THE GOLDEN AGE
JAN STEEN AND THE PORTRAYAL OF YOUTH
!
SEBASTIAN ARYANA
UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE . . . i 1. INTRODUCTION . . . 1 2. HISTORICITY . . . 7 3. ARTISTIC DIALOGUE . . . .15 4. CHILDREN IN ART . . . .19 5. COMIC TRADITION . . . 256. 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 Johannes Vermeer’s Little
Street in Delft. 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 Rijksmuseum 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 Art History, which ranges from portraiture to comics to landscape and seascape. The likes of Vermeer and Rembrandt 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
!
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 Haarlem 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 Netherlands. This was a broad category of humorous and delightful pictures, which in accordance to contemporary norms, functioned both as entertainment and moral instructions.
!
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
!
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:
!
children. He never conceived the real nature of childhood. Frans Hals 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 Jan Miense Molenaer, 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:
!
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.!
!
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 Dirck Hals sparked something in Molenaer as well.10 Then
around 1640, Molenaer fell under Adriaen van Ostade’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 Dutch Golden Age (Raleigh, N.C.: North Carolina
Museum of Art, 2002), 9.!
!
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.!
!
Steen gave them a distinctive characteristic that was unprecedented in early depictions by artists such as Frans Hals, Jan Miense Molenaer, Judith Leyster, 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.
!
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 Dutch Republic During the 17th Century (New York: Scribner, 1974), 13.
2 Ibid., 119. 3 Ibid., 15.!
!
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.
!
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 Utrecht, 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
!
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 Holland. 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.!
!
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
!
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.
!
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.
!
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.!
!
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.” –Karel van Mander
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.
2Peter Schatborn, Dutch Figure Drawings from the Seventeenth Century (The Hague: National Government
Publication, 1981), 79.!
!
(Fig. 6), the boy has been said to resemble a figure in Gerard ter Borch’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 genre art 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
!
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 Monografieën over Hollandsche en Vlaamsche Schilders (Amsterdam: Becht,
1939), 29.
7 Walsh, Jan Steen: The Drawing Lesson, 9-10.!
!
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 Monografieën over Hollandsche en Vlaamsche Schilders, 42. 10 Wouter Th. Kloek, Jan Steen: 1626-1679 (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2005), 5.!
!
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.!
!
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,
!
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.
!
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.
!
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 Jacob Jordaens. 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.
!
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.
!
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.
!
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 Ovid’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 Antwerp 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 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3Herman Roodenburg, The Eloquence of the Body: Perspectives on Gesture in the Dutch Republic (Zwolle:
Waanders Publishers, 2005), 116.
4Ibid., 119. 5Ibid., 129.
6 Chapman et la., Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, 53. 7 Kloek, Jan Steen: 1626-1679, 65.
!
farces and designed the stage. Similar cooperation existed also in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Frans Hals, Esias van de Velde, and Adriaen Brouwer, 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.
10Ibid., 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.!
!
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.!
