The evil versus the innocent: the representation of children in Jan Steen’s paintings and the seventeenth century religious concepts in the Dutch Republic

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Universiteit van Amsterdam

Graduate School of Humanities

The evil versus the innocent: the representation of

children in Jan Steen’s paintings and the

seventeenth century religious concepts in the Dutch

Republic

By

Hoyee Tse

(Student Number: 11107944)

Supervisor: Professor Frans Grijzenhout

This dissertation is submitted for the degree of

Master of Arts

in Arts and Culture (Dutch Art)

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Abstract

Childhood is the first stage of our life. The experiences of childhood imprint on our mind generating repercussions throughout and determining our demeanours for the rest of our earthly journey. So when we try to discover the livelihood of the seventeenth century Dutchmen, it is essential to first understand this cornerstone of childhood. Family household was the place where children spent most of their time, thereby parents became the very people influencing their livelihood. The concepts of parents towards children derived from a complex ideological network which concerned with their social status and religious beliefs. The religious heterogeneity in the Dutch Republic diversified child-rearing practices based on their respective ideas about inborn human nature. The Protestant and Catholic composed of the majority of Christian population in the Netherlands. While the Protestant concluded children innate with original sin, who needed to be strictly disciplined, the Catholic believed in infant baptism to relieve them from immediate salvation. Such disparity resulted in a division of expectations about how to moralise the little beings. Accommodating these contrasting expectations from the parents, painters in the art market had to produce different images of how children lived within their families. Jan Steen, one of the most renowned comic painters in the Dutch Golden Age, actively ‘participated’ in representing the children of his time. With his painterly wit, he veneered the concepts of children and childhood by various comic devices. The harsher attitude and child-rearing practices that the Protestant proclaimed turn into humour to be laughed at. The more lenient approach with which the Catholic parents spoilt their children appear as comic truth. In this study, I explore how Steen’s representation of children help us to recognise the divergence of religious beliefs led to a variety of child experiences. Why did Steen depict children being scolded when making music in one painting but not in another? Why were some children allowed to smoke and drink at pleasure while the others were punished? The multiplicity of Steen’s pictorial representations owes to the multiplicity of ideas in his milieu. His paintings give us a clue of the way people perceived children in early modern period. 

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Introduction

The harbinger of life in pictures

‘Soule is yet a white paper unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith at length it becomes a blurred note book.’1

Everyone used to be a child, but we may not remember precisely which every tiny fragment has made us who we are today. What did we observe? Who were those ‘writers scribbling on our blank notebook’? Parents, teachers, siblings, and everyone else who has appeared in our lives all have contributed to the prelude of our lifelong monologue. We are shaped by the experiences shared with these people and the way they have perceived us. For certain, there was no exception for the seventeenth century Dutch children. They also underwent such journeys before they reached their adulthood. Unlike us though, their lives were preserved in paintings and literature rather than photographs and videos. These visual sources offer us an insight about how these children lived centuries ago and how they were perceived as individuals, social beings and even religious subjects. During early modern period, there were unprecedented developments altering many facets of Dutch children’s lives. The still prevalent but gradually declining influence of religion was counterbalanced by the rise of socio-economic forces in form of proto-capitalism. As the nation arrived at its apex of prosperity, novel sentiments towards the status of children and reevaluation of household arose. An intricate issue of designating the role of children in society ensued from the awareness of the wider cultural and religious politics threaded with the private life.

The concepts of children and childhood are very sensitive to time and space. To investigate them, we need to acknowledge the uniqueness of the early modern Dutch viewpoint towards children and their livelihood. Simon Schama claimed that the seventeenth century Dutch Republic as a ‘Republic of Children’ implied that the Dutch had a peculiar attitude towards children. His argument is based on the Dutch parental bond underscoring the undoubtedly significant and atypical contribution of family life to the concepts of childhood and children in the republic. But we cannot neglect the country’s socio-cultural interaction with the other European countries.

Earle, 1811, pp.1-2.

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Dekker and Groenendijk refuted to Schama and claimed that he only provides a revamp of the older assumptions. They reappraise Schama’s book and uncover the Dutch affectionate practice of child-rearing and concept of children are not as distinctive as the author advocated. A consent is, however, reached between these 2

scholars: early modern period was fundamental for the change of value of children and childhood and admitted the difficulty in defining ‘children’ and ‘childhood’ which has been a long historical issue. Etymologically, despite ancient Greek and Latin 3

did not have any equivalent to the word ‘baby’, they did have specific words associated to children or childhood. The latin words infans and puer indicated the characteristics of children as ‘not speaking’ and ‘puerile’. Nonetheless, we are uncertain whether the words relate to age or status and this problem remains in any 4

variance of these original forms. Until the late Middle Ages, the concepts towards children and childhood took their shapes: infantia and pueritia were the two stages of childhood from birth to age fourteenth. This gives us a clearer scope of study since the medieval concepts still held on those of early modernity, especially associated to the socio-religious issues.

The Reformation brought the unprecedented changes to how people saw and treated their children. The Protestant and Roman Catholic outlooks of soul and original sin caused undervaluation and overvaluation of children. This split of religious beliefs thereby led to the divergence of artistic representations. After iconoclasm, the mode of representing religious concepts shifted. In the Dutch Republic, genre paintings dominated the art market over historical and portrait paintings to depict everyday life of the citizens. On one hand, these were regarded as the mirror of people’s life. On the other hand, the viewers could decipher moral meanings from the pictorial subject and details. Owing to its interpretative capacity, genre paintings are the useful visual sources we can probe into the concepts of children and childhood. Among the cornucopia of genre painters, Jan Steen was one of the most renowned painters rendering moralising genre paintings. Although none of his pictorial procedures is totally unparalleled, some of his compositional and coloristic means set very much his hallmarks. Before analysing the ideological implications of the paintings, understanding these pictorial devices is necessary

Dekker & Groenendijk, 1991, p.319.

2

Ariès, 1962, pp.229-230.

3

Cunningham, 2005, pp.19 & 22.

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because they mostly serve and direct his comical narratives. The most noticeable is 5

his choice of theme; Steen frequently selects themes of intra-family socialisation. Inseparable correlation of parents and children makes his paintings very appropriate for our discussion about concepts of children and childhood.

The goal of my study is to elucidate how Jan Steen attempted to represent the concepts of children and childhood in his paintings. In other words, Steen’s paintings are one of the sources from which we explore the socio-cultural discourses about children. However, this scope remains too general and extensive for my investigation. So I will narrow it down to the religious discourses relevant to Steen’s paintings and his milieu as the diversity of religions in the Dutch Republic prominently contributes to the different attitudes towards children. Furthermore, the scope falls more on the second half of seventeenth century, more accurately from 1648 onwards. In that year, Steen began to be active in the art market and the Peace of Münster ended the Eighty Years’ War of the Dutch against the Spanish Hapsburg Empire. The peace treaty decisively relocated the sphere of religious influences: Protestants received greater authority as Calvinism gained legal recognition to be the official church while under the principle of freedom, Catholics were still accepted to practise underground. Such critical change in the circumstances facilitated the more prosperous production of genre paintings as visual representations of various religious values.

In the first chapter, I am going to delve into the context of Steen’s art production. This is necessary because the environment equips not only the painter but also his audience’s response to the complex visual stimulations on canvases. The role of 6

spectators was prominent in the thriving seventeenth century art market and these potential buyers of the artworks were usually parents. The scarcity of sources directly written by children urge this shift of our attention to those sources related to their parents. We can infer that the painter would produce, at least partly, according

Westermann, 1997, p.121.

5

Baxandall, 1972, pp.38-39. In his discussion about Italian Renaissance art production, the

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author constantly stressed on the importance of the public to the artist, implied the influence of the patronising classes i.e. mercantile and professional men on artistic conventions. Although Baxandall focused on the patronage system, the composition of its clientele was similar to the customers of Steen’s paintings. So Baxandall’s idea is useful for the Dutch art market in the seventeenth century which developed mainly according to the taste of the emerging middle classes. It is essential to examine the circumstance from which Steen’s audience brought to the complex visual stimulations.

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to the taste and preference of these Dutch parents, and adjust them according to himself as a father. A pivotal factor framing the mentality of these parents was the religion they believed. Therefore, Steen needed the skill to depict the demeanours of children in families following different religions. If his works had to be sold in the market, he would need something more than his stylistic niche. With a great sensitivity to the consumer demand, he had to resemble a spectrum of religious ideas about the nature of children and recommend the child-rearing practices these parents had to use correspondingly. 7

Of course, there are many approaches to interpret Steen’s children in the light of artistic and religious conventions. Dekker proposes two strategies of moral education that the Dutch genre paintings designed for its seventeenth century middle-class spectators complementary to moral education by the church. The first 8

was moralising by pleasure: teaching and learning the virtues with fun similar to popular emblematic books on marriage and child-rearing by Jacob Cats. The second was teaching and learning the virtues by beautifying the family and childhood as what Pope Gregory XV defined congregio de propaganda in 1622. It was a rhetorical art produced with the main intention for a socially significant group of people, namely the elevating middle-class, on behalf of a parental requirement for child-rearing. For Steen’s paintings, I find the artist implemented both strategies with his comic mode of representation and deft manner of handling. These comic and aesthetic images moralising children and parents are the stepping stone for me to derive the concepts of children and childhood.

Since the mid-twentieth century, iconography is of the most common methods to analyse the Dutch genre paintings. Durantini points out the lacunae of studies focusing only on larger issues in the state of research of early modern children study. She assumes the increasing importance of the children in art, to whose activity the artists intently draws our attention. She explores the multiplicity of iconographical meanings with various representations of children’s activities. Although my investigation does not concentrate on how many plausible moral meanings people can extract from these scenes with children, her argument with

Baxandall, 1972, p.40. Each acquired skills relevant to his observation of painting through

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social activities. There arose more generally accessible styles of discrimination. A painter thus consistently catered for the highest common skills the majority of his public equipped with in order to broaden his market threshold.

Dekker, 2009, p.169.

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reference to contemporary and literature paves the ways for in-depth analysis of how the ideas of childhood and children are visualised in pictures. She reiterates the inapplicability of the sixteenth century attitudes inherent in artworks, which in part reflect contemporary upheaval and unrest, to the seventeenth century works produced in a fundamentally stable socio-political and educational situation. I 9

agreed with the transformation of ideological in line with the context. However, she over-emphasises adults as the receivers of those moral messages. Many of her discussions are irrelevant to children but only highlight the adults’ manner of child-rearing. She remarks that the actual appearance and activity of the child contribute none of the connotations attached to the images. The activities of children, in her point of view, tell us nothing about childhood and merely comment in a general fashion on adults and adulthood. This is largely disagreeable because if children 10

do not function for their own sake but in service of the others, why would painters execute plenty of paintings with child protagonists? Moreover, without defining children as individual characters, the juxtaposition, from which the moral messages stem, do not stand firm. What she misses out from her study on these children paintings is indeed an essential prime step to confer those iconographical meanings: to know about the familial and educational role of adults in the society, we have to first examine what children were in their ideas. Education and child-rearing practices are the response to the concept of children, not its initiative. I do not violate the intention of moralising adults through children’s behaviours yet we should be fully aware that iconographical analysis is not the merely viable method to tackle the possible meanings of Steen’s paintings.

Then what kind of knowledge would the seventeenth century parents anticipate to acquire from looking at children in genre paintings? To what extent could they perceive those concepts of children and childhood? It must owe to the artist’s mode of representation and skill. The late-seventeenth century and early eighteenth century art critics’ biographies affirm Steen’s comicality and virtuosity. These art literatures found our basis of understanding the painter’s distinct style and mode of

Durantini, 1979, p.152.

9

Durantini, 1979, p.38.

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expression as well as his personal connection with the pictorial subjects. 11

Westermman included the background of these art critics — Arnold Houbraken as student of Samuel van Hoogstraten and Descamps trained by Boucher and Fragnonard — in order to remind us about the perspective they projected at criticising Steen’s art. Their commentaries convincingly denote a series of constant opinions toward Steen’s style as, in Westermann’s term, a novel storyteller. The author stresses on the genericness of the paintings and its respective mode of expression to justify this naming of Steen. This leads our way ultimately to assess our method of interpretation. For Steen who characterised his paintings by immersing himself within the comic conventions, we inevitably need to discern the tradition of comic. Westermann clarifies how comic works acquit themselves of the tasks through some central comic narratives. Apart from thematic 12

correspondences of comic literature to paintings, she lists the assumptions, features and inventiveness of comic plays and poems, and describes their possible visual charges. This is a very crucial remark about from which angle we can incise into enquiring the nature of Steen’s personages, in my study, of both parents and children.

My main research centred on comic genre paintings entails an interdisciplinary approach more than iconography. The children in Steen’s paintings can inculcate the concepts of children and childhood without warnings to the adults’ morals. Comic devices mentioned by Westermann manoeuvre ironies and humours to narrate the story of mischief such as the folly of children. Meanwhile, the photographic nature of Steen’s paintings gains support from the idea about pure descriptiveness claimed by Svetlana Alpers, also known as realism. Steen’s meticulous description of the children reinforces the power of images to disseminate discourses. Alike portraits, Dekker argued that genre paintings embody the idea of mirroring reality. Thus a precise distinction of portraiture and genre paintings is difficult. Steen excavated materials from his everyday life and veneered them with his comic narration. This blurs the border between which pictorial details refer to aspects of realities and those as solely fictional devices. The endless debate of representation against

Westermman, 1997, Chapter 1. The sources facilitated the development of Steen’s style

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admix of poems, comedies, local policies, moral books and other artistic products like woodcuts and prints. Hence, a study of his representation of children should not be limited to the field of artistic convention.

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reality indicates a continuous oscillation between interpretative methods of mirroring realities and fictional representation. 13

Albeit it is not possible to determine whether the folly of children in Steen’s paintings happened in reality or not, the prevalent religious concepts of children and childhood render us a guide to comprehend his subject choices and comic representation. I am going to explain how the different features of comic representation suitable to different religious viewpoints. This serves as an attempt to provide a rationale for Steen’s pictorial choices. Each set of religious ideologies has its own child-rearing practices. The interactions and responses of the adults with the children in Steen’s paintings reflect the religious beliefs of the viewers as well as of the artist. The disparity and congruity of children’s behaviours and adult reactions in the paintings all owe to the subjectivity of Steen and his viewers. Accommodating to the Protestant concepts, he adopts more exaggerating expressions to portray the folly and intolerance of children, signifying that those children need to be stricter disciplined. So the second chapter will correlate the comic ironies and humours, usually about the children as the unruly, with the Protestant idea of children’s embodiment of original sin. Often as a prompt of laughter, they are condemned by the adults in the same pictures. As a Catholic, Steen depicts the Catholic viewpoint in less of a comic but more of realistic representation. The last chapter hence discusses how Steen employs comic realist devices to present the children’s, most probably his children’s innocence. Children naively imitating the adults without knowing their misbehaviours dovetail with the Catholic concepts of children as the subject of protection. This study is about in which aspect we can disclose the mindset of his audience by investigating the pictorial means Steen utilised. 

Dekker, 2015, p.705.

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Chapter One

From buyers in art market to parents in family: the context of

Steen’s children representation

The proto-capitalist economic system of the Dutch Republic facilitated the proliferation of art production during its seventeenth century Golden Age. The ongoing opulence and stability of the nation heightened the demand for images for aesthetic pleasure. Around the mid-century, the production volume of paintings in the nation soared to about 70,000 paintings annually and there were about seven hundred painters at work. This almost paradoxical situation in the post-iconoclasm period confirmed the Dutch faith on the power of imagery. This vast production at the same time encouraged the existence of a strong belief in images for other purposes such as disseminating ideas of virtues and moralisation. So that in this market, 14

producers and consumers were in pursuit of enjoying fine art as well as of moral teaching. Paintings were not only products of trade but means of learning. As a painter, Steen had to ponder on what kind of art to produce with a market-oriented viewpoint: what his consumers would find beautiful and would like to learn. His paintings had to be explicit and didactic with a desire of improving the behaviours of parents and parents-to-be, especially in relation with their children. In this chapter, 15

I will explore the context of which Steen’s paintings of children were consumed. The intimacy of pictorial subjects with its socio-economic context urges us to examine the role and background of spectators. When pictures were created with an actual or prospective audience in mind, the painters would contemplate the perspective of those who viewed it: their social status, self-identification and cultural knowledge. The ‘readers’ of the paintings were the knowledge- and pleasure-seekers whom the painters expected to master the meaning of visual language, or more of the body language of those figures represented. Their efficacy to decipher the messages delivered by art depended on their engagement in the condensed artistic and cultural landscape of the country as much as their own identity within the society. I assume that they would not look at the children in the paintings just for enjoyments; they would also make judgement of them as parents. The family structure and

Dekker, 2009, p.167.

14

Dekker, 2009, p.167.

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parental role of child-rearing determined how these judgements were provoked. One of the critical agencies intervening their reception of artistic representation was religious belief. Therefore, in addition to explaining the role these adult spectators played in the market, I will indicate their parental role within family and their linkage with religion. I will portray how the religious spheres of influence within the republic have brought up separate groups of parent buyers, searching for distinct visualisations of their family experiences.

The public of the art market

The seventeenth century Dutch art market was a battlefield for painters competing against each other with their creativity and virtuosity. Accommodating to the taste of audience in vogue was almost compulsory to earn a living. Painters of comic style, like Steen, would expect the public as his audience of jokes. The most active consumers in the free market were not the traditional upper class, who would generally prefer patronage and pay for exclusive buying rights from the painters before they retailed their works in the market. Due to the vast production volume, the majority of paintings was priced low that even the very average citizens could afford some. The republic mutated from an aristocratic society into a bourgeois 16

society. The flourishing economic sector raised the power and broaden the breath of the middle class. Hence, the clientele usually came fewer from lower social status and more from the middle class. They were not just more financially capable to buy the paintings but also mentally willing to be caught by them. Paintings became their normal furniture challenging the privilege of art ownerships reserved for a small elite and well-off group. Looking at the works of art turned fundamental for the Dutch collective mentality. It was an indispensable part of everyday life for many burghers, especially when the images would reflect their own reality, at their own family and children.17

This audience indisputably contributed Steen’s clientele. To envisage Steen’s audience as comprehensive as possible, Westermann dedicates a section of her book to the profiles of his customers, upholding the crucial attachment of market and artistic practice. She appraises the pictorial quality of Steen’s paintings and suggests that probably his pictures were produced with patronage. With her list of

Dekker, 2009, p.169.

16

Dekker, 2015, p.709.

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many identifiable owners of Steen’s paintings, she portrays the supposedly audience of his paintings to be the upper middle class while emphasises on the unarguable position of Leiden buyers in his clientele. The inventories of these owners, for instance, that of van Ring’s inventory and Dusart’s collection demonstrate the upper class interest in the lowlife subjects. She shows the recorded high-value transactions of the dissolute household paintings, Steen’s famous works between these affluent collectors. Although there are no further details on their familial or religious entities, it is certain that Steen would have to take into account of the upper middle class’ opinion and taste. The painter had to dextrously handle the combination of content and aesthetic packing otherwise he could not impress and transmit the moral messages to this audience with high visual literacy and requirement.

The parental clients

Paintings were images for moral learning as an early modern equivalent of propaganda. Visual art functioned as a major cognitive transfer of the seventeenth century Dutch moral contents. The power of fine art commonly were to complement the strategy of moralising by fun through the popular emblematic books. Comic paintings reconciled the fun and aesthetic for moralisation the consumers desired. The strong feelings of embarrassment these well-to-do buyers would need this type of art with ambivalence of moralising and demonising simultaneously. A majority of the population overruled these feelings eventually by the huge consumption of deftly and sumptuously manufactured moralistic paintings on the familial values about parenting, childhood and education. Their learning resolved the clear 18

contradictions between beauty and frugality. Steen, named by Dekker as ‘ironic 19

moralist’ painted a series of devotion paintings. For example his Prayer before 20 Dinner (Figure 1), which was inspired by earlier paintings by Adriean van Ostade,

depicted a small family of simplicity and affection. The moment indicates an essential aspect of Christian cultural transmission as an educational means for learning obedience, virtuousness and piousness within a family. Even the parent buyers intended to purchase the paintings for the delight or education of their

Dekker, 2009, passim. 18 Spaans, 2004, pp.130-31. 19 Dekker, 2009, p.173. 20

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children, these mature citizens were still the final decision-makers about which paintings to be bought into their house. This implied parents chose what kind of morals their children had to learn. Family was the first domain where the concepts of children and childhood formed.

The Dutch bourgeois art collectors were the parents in the vanguard of those coveting these intimate relations that realised in Steen’s painting within the home and wishing to lavish special attention upon their children. ‘The history of the family 21

is parent-centred.’ The Dutch pioneered in the evolution of family. They formulated 22

a family structure of nuclear family that has dictated the structure of our modern family nowadays. Family continually centred at their children’s life essentially for how they were raised and taught, how they prayed and played and what they ate and drank. The ideal family accentuated on the responsibilities of parenthood because parents engaged the most initial and long-lasting role in children’s life. Lawrence Stone highlights the turning points of historical development of family from the sixteenth to nineteenth century. He set his study on the materials of English families, which shares the same circumstance of a privileged Protestant church with the Dutch. Two of three types of family that he identifies are relevant to the seventeenth century: the ‘restricted patriarchal nuclear family’ in the period of 1550 and 1700 and the ‘closed domesticated nuclear family’ of 1640 and 1800. The 23

former type dominated especially amongst Puritans. It refers to family whose children have to behave with great formality in the presence of their parents. Until 24

around 1660, another type of family set the bedrock for change in accepted child-rearing theory and in standard child-child-rearing practices of modern society. In decline of aristocratic society, there was a rise of individualism. The Opies ascertained a remarkable continuity in children’s cultural forms: they would reinterpret the social models given by adults through their own ordered system of rules. Principal 25

Dekker & Groenendijk, 1991, p.318.

21

Cunningham, 2005, p.82.

22

Stone, 1977, pp.405, 411, 449-478. He points out the key changes of attitude towards

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children lays on the transformation of parent-children relationships. The overlapping

between the two types of family structure suggests the transitionary nature of early modern European family. As a consequence, child-rearing practices vary in relation to each family’s religious belief and socio-economic status.

Stone, 1977, pp.105-107, 161-74.

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Opie & Opie, 1977. & James, 1982.

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parental attitudes to and treatment of children thus alternated cyclically between the permissive and the repressive: sometimes parents let their children indulged in pleasure and curiosity, sometimes they restricted their childish folly with punishment. This type of family was more similar to the humanist one in which children obtained a degree of freedom.

Nonetheless, what would children do if they were free to choose? They got their inspiration from their parents and inclined to duplicate the behaviours of their parents, thereby a prevalent mode of child-rearing was imitation. ‘So de ouden songen, pypen de jiongen’. The Dutch idea of the young imitating the old denoted contradictory yet inevitable separation and conglomeration of adulthood and childhood. For instance, in Steen’s painting Children Teaching a Cat to Dance (Figure 2), the children imitate the adults playing music and smoking pipe for pleasure. The painting exhibits the wonder of being a child in the seventeenth century depended on foods and toys. These objects the parents gave to their children yearned for delight and family enjoyment as much as for education. 26

Education did not necessarily mean schooling. Parental guidance and paragon were always the most influential to the children’s behaviours and well-beings. The 27

cultural environment established by writers, painters, teachers and theologians supported the parents of feasible child-rearing practices. They reinforced the ideals foundational to the civil fabric: through their own conduct and the teachings, parents imparted to and nurtured their children individual growth and civic responsibility. 28

Early modern parents believed outward body language revealed inward thoughts and emotions. With training of good manners, children should control their desires as young as possible. Under parental education, all boys and girls were devoted to preserving chastity and so to coming of age properly. 29

For sure, the method to attain these goals varied from family to family. Jacobus Koelman, the orthodox Calvinist reverend in his advice book for parents,

Barnes & Rose, 2012, p.xi. The authors provide a brief yet comprehensive historiography

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about literature and scholarly works of the seventeenth Dutch children. The recipes for the foods Dutch children enjoyed reveal the basic human connections that exist between that distant world and ours. Understanding the past strengthens that of the present.

Shahar, 1992, p.174.

27

Barnes & Rose, 2012, pp.x~xi.

28

Dekker, 2009, pp.181-182.

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underscored the importance of partner choice explicitly for the future quality of parenting. Interestingly, he advised against any marriage between partners with different religions since it was a source of confusion for the children. Otherwise, that would result in disparity of pedagogical motives. His advice is justifiable particularly 30

in terms of gender. Different religions had their own definition of roles of gender within the family. Among the circles of the urban merchant elite of the Dutch Republic, nuclear private families were formed with complementary tasks for men and women. This gendered obligations within family contrasted different family 31

members: fathers were responsible for teaching sons while mothers were for daughters. Van Brekelenkam produced a series of domestic interiors with the tailor 32

father teaching his sons the skills (Figure 3) and daughters learning lace-making from her mother (Figure 4). Home was the place for children to carry out more skilled tasks as a gradual initiation into the world of adult work as well as to learn 33

about the role of their gender. These genre paintings depicted children’s role performed everyday in their family in prepare for their future in the society. Parents who saw these moralising images would discern their power over their children’s life but might not agree with the approach the parents in the paintings adopted on educating their children. They chose child-rearing practices according to their concepts of children. Religion stood at a dominant position in shaping these concepts in the early modern Netherlands.

Religious family

Jack Goody, a twentieth century social anthropologist, argued that the ‘child-oriented family’ was ‘intrinsic to the religious ideology of the Christian Church from a very early period’. The religious context of the Dutch Republic exerted eminent impact 34

on the parents about their concepts of children and child-rearing practices. Although its public appeared to be religiously homogenous in the ‘Protestant north’, the

Dekker, 2009, p.171. From around mid-seventeenth century, religiously mixed marriages

30

became more an exception. People would convert themselves into another religion of their betrothed before the wedding. For example, Johannes Vermeer had converted himself into Catholic when he married his Catholic wife Catharina Bolenes.

Daalen, 2010, p.352. 31 Shahar, 1992, p.174. 32 Shahar, 1992, p.174. 33

Goody, 1983, p.153. See also Cunningham, 2005, p.33.

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Protestant did not successfully create a monopoly of recognised religion on the normal western European model. With much its chagrin, all believers were within their churches regardless of the Protestant dominating the governmental positions in their society. By mid-seventeenth century, despite the Protestant church gained 35

increasingly stronger authority, the society persisted in being religiously heterogeneous. Calvinist with a minority being hardcore orthodox, who targeted at establishing a Protestant-religion monopoly, accounted for forty percent of the total Christian believers while there were Protestant minorities as Lutherans and Anabaptists consisted another twenty percent. At opposite, the remaining forty percent was the Roman Catholics. The spiritual life of the republic was divided into 36

two ecclesiastically organised religious groups the Protestant and the Catholic.

Among the Protestant, none except the Calvinists had any real social power. It found its origins of that power in the iconoclasm of the 1660s. In 1648, the Calvinist triumphed over the Roman Catholic Hapsburgs with the Peace of Münster. As the privileged, public church, Calvinist Reformed Church subjugated the other denominations — Remonstrants, Lutherans and Socinians — with its recognition by the civil authorities to exclude them. It could prohibit the cult of a false doctrine yet not the doctrine itself, preventing these denominations from promulgating their ideas. Furthermore, Calvinists were the only candidates being admitted to political offices. Without being an established church, a Calvinist bourgeois form of government already took control over the nation. Even so for the topic about 37

imagery production, major tensions between enjoying beauty and living stayed pressing in line with the Calvinistic rules of behaviour. On one side, after iconoclasm, it supposedly opposed against almost all visual arts even used for moral messages within their own religion; there did not accept reconciliation between enjoying beauty and searching for frugality. On the other side, the powerful minority of orthodox Calvinists approved the use of fine art as a strategy for moral teaching. The support for a bridge of moral teaching and visual representation 38

could owe to the propaganda competition against their opposite camp, the Catholic.

MacCulloch, 2003, pp.367 & 370. 35 Dekker, 2009, p.168. 36 Bruyn, 1959, p.6. 37

Lindeboom, 1929, passim. See also Thiel, 1990-1991, p.50.

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The Catholic was able to continue its underground existence, either accepted or condoned under the Reformed church surveillance. Even with all the burgomasters, magistrates and councillors of Amsterdam had already been Protestants by 1581, during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the oldest and most respectable families were still overwhelmingly Catholic. Within the religious sector, there remained twenty-two secular priests, three Franciscans, one Jesuit and one Dominican. Even so, some factors indeed sapped the Catholic strength. Most 39

overtly, Catholics could not manifest their religion in public and so could only have their discreet communal activities in secret venues, namely the Amsterdam merchant Jan Hartman’s secret attic church Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder built in 1663. Also, there existed the divisions within the strictly hierarchical, monolithic Catholic camp. A pluralism of theological questions kept authority restricted to a clearly defined dualism: the controversy between the secular and monastic clergy over the state of the church in the apostate Netherlands. It undermined the Catholic, who was not allowed to have their own ecclesiastic system, as a power block.40

Based on the principle of cuius regio cuius religio in the Augsburg summit in 1555, the dominant Protestant church was responsible to devise the moral education in the Dutch Republic. But the division of faiths seemed to implicitly permit that 41

parents with different religious beliefs would implement different modes of education on their children since they would have different concepts in children’s nature. ‘Religious life in the seventeenth century was a rich and many-coloured tapestry.’ 42

The early modern Dutch educational discourse originally stemmed from the Christian faith. And that Christian faith was diversely interpreted for all inhabitants of the country. Honouring the principle of freedom and conscience, the Union of 43

Utrecht in 1579 expressly stated that there was formally no freedom of worship yet always freedom of conscience. Dominique Colas advocated the Dutch nation with a ‘multiplication of intolerances and fanaticisms within different religious groups.’ 44

Rogier, 1946, pp.115, 126. 39 Thiel, 1990-1991, p.50. 40 Dekker, 2009, p.167. 41

Thiel, 1990-1991, p.49. See also Spaans, 1989.

42

Dekker, 2009, p.167.

43

MacCulloch, 2003, p.373. MacCulloch quoted from Colas, Dominique. Civil Society and

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Although religious pluralism did not imply it as a benevolent one, ‘religious pragmatism ruled daily life.’ How parents trained and treated their children solely 45

relied on their mentality. This intricate situation of religious and political power conflicts gave rise to the confronting ideas about how to see and raise children.

Interrelationship of art, religion and family

In this chapter, I explored a complex network of relations intertwining art, religion and family in the seventeenth century Dutch Republic. It demonstrated the ideological cooperation of Netherlandish artistic culture with other contextual factors as agents of change. Social life seemingly created distinct domains of the public 46

and the private: the art production seemed to have no explicit relation with the private life of their consumers. However, as I explained, these three components remain mutually dependent and reflexive for parents and children. Their interrelationship reiterates the discursivity of the imagery underlying the notion of art production. Painters like Steen was most probably aware of this power of images in refashioning relations and identities across the emergent early modern forms of public and private spheres. The pragmatism of using images to disseminate religious ideas and familial values drove the acceptance of the religious differences but not necessarily agreed with religious equality. As a Catholic, though we are not sure how devoted he was, it would not be surprising if Steen depicted the Catholic practices of child-rearing with more realistic handling and accompanied the Protestant practices with more ironies and humours. In the following two chapters, I am going to analyse how Steen extracted different instruments of comic representation to portray the distinctive Protestant and Catholic concepts of children and childhood.  

Dekker, 2009, p.168.

45

Salomon, 2004, p.79.

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Chapter Two

The evil as comic: Transforming the Protestant children into

Steen’s comic characters

Comedy embraces the meanings of both ‘comical’ and ‘comic’, amusement and revelry. It was born as a genre in theatre but its characteristics have evolved into devices literature and paintings deploy to communicate ideas. In this chapter, I am going to examine some distinguishing features of comedy which Steen employed as devices to represent children. He then applied those comic devices for articulating the Protestant concepts of children and childhood. In other words, I will explain how the images of children Steen presented were devised exclusively to befit the visualisation of the Protestant ideology. It is to suggest that children in some of Steen’s paintings were tailored to satisfy the Protestant parents. They were representations in response to a set of prevalent concepts, not necessarily referring to the reality. For this reason, mode of expression with bodily exaggeration became amusing and lively, almost inappropriate and laughable.

Comic paintings by Steen are pictorial comedies that one of the stated objectives for the seventeenth century viewers was either moral uplift or amusement, rather than pedantry or appraisal as for us the modern interpreters. With the increasing 47

popularity of genre paintings from the sixteenth century onwards in the Northern Europe, a comic tradition was succeeded by a line of painters, each formulating and reinterpreting the typical features of visual comedy. Skimming through the oeuvres of these painters, children kept recurring as personage and turned into one of the standard motifs and subjects. Steen, as the most engaging genre painter in this comic tradition within the Dutch art circle, also executed paintings carrying in-depth moral messages or ideologies in the guise of childish amusement. With his acumen, Steen varied the comic elements, created his traits, and adopted them into representing the Protestant concepts of the sinful, unruly children. His portrayal exaggerates the folly of children and the reciprocal child-rearing practices of the adults in the seventeenth century Dutch Republic.

To explain this accordance between traditional visual comic and Protestant values, I am going to focus on paintings with motif of music-making and family gatherings.

Alpers, 1978-1979, p.48.

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Steen’s characters will unfold the idea of imitation and tight bond between parents and children in the Protestant family. This will reflect how children were being seen and treated under the Protestant ideology of family and education. I will compare

Children Teaching a Cat to Dance (Figure 2) with A Young Woman Playing a Harpsichord to a Young Man (Figure 5) to demonstrate how the artist interpreted

one motif of music-making in different lights: children make noises whereas adults produce harmony. The parallel of children and adult music-making scenes underlines the idiosyncratic concept that children lacked of capability to control themselves and had to be disciplined with stricter child-rearing practices. A popular strategy for parents, especially the less wealthy parents who had to work, was to send their children to school for education of knowledge and manner. For this, I will discuss The Stern Schoolmaster (Figure 14) and The Village School (Figure 15). Though the harsh punishment and fierce attitude of the teachers in Steen’s paintings on surface appear dramatic and comic, a specific mentality is purposefully instilled underlying this stringency. It is that the teachers implemented the child-rearing practice the Protestant parents found appropriate and even imperative for their children on the way to salvation. To assess how Steen achieved this goal of moralisation through comic expression, I need to first delve into a brief historiography of comic tradition, thence denote what instruments traditional pictorial comic offered to Steen.

The comic tradition evolved from literature to pictures

What is comic? In Greek mythology, Comus is the god of the low mode or revelry. His name was where the words ‘comic’ and ‘comedy’ originated from. Comedy was the very first form of comic rendering. When comedy was born in theatre as a tone of narration, it functioned as a means of organising a series of persistent themes across a variety of settings, usually in forms of inversion like the ‘world-turned-upside down’ scenario. Characters acting as sidekicks in tragedy occupy the 48

leading role as protagonists. Hence, the aim of comic is to investigate alternative identities, commonly of social minority like children. There is a relaxation of social codes or a suspension of laws governing the body: children can manifest their nature unrestricted by their parents. Such disorderly demeanours defined the down-to-earth humour of comedy, arising the popularity of the style. This tradition of comedy literature and plays founded the audience basis for appreciating secular,

Stott, 1997, p.2.

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low-life genre paintings. As Chapman said, ‘A fundamental aspect of seventeenth century art theory was the relation between painting and the theatre.’ Theatre 49

framed the pattern of comic representation and its public’s conception, thereby imagery borrowed this template for carrying out its own function. Pictures did serve for more than amusement in seventeenth century Netherlands. In spite of its low-life nature, comic mode of representation could not and did not deny the didactic intentions inherited from late-medieval and Renaissance religious art. Rather than being purely didactic and moralistic, it hybridised pleasure and entertainment with education.

Comic also had its root at the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Alpers identified two strains of the sixteenth century comedy: humanist wit and medieval folk carnival tradition. Festive comedy was admitted folly as a human condition. In the 50

Renaissance, the linkage between comedy and the feast which Plato’s Symposium mentioned was recalled and presented as a venerable history. Rabelais addressed his Gargantua in 1533 to ‘most noble boozers’. He characteristically emphasised the physical fact of bodily refreshment and reactive nature of the feast on both the writer and the reader. During the sixteenth century, rhetorician tradition, rederijker, 51

continued the praise for comic mode with their humorous, amorous and spiritual lyric. In late-sixteenth century and seventeenth century, the Netherlandish comic theorists referred to classical and Renaissance poetics to define the themes and modes proper to comedy. They reiterated the less explicit representational means 52

in the Aristotelian view with the statement attributed to Cicero. The Roman orator declared that comedy should be ‘an imitation of life, a mirror of good mores, an image of truth’. Bredero, who trained as a painter, maintained the analogous 53

efficacy of comic paintings and comedies. He argued that rough comedy improved viewers by the ‘naked and painting-like representation of the abuses of the most recent and dissolute world, the infirmity of the time, the generally known

Chapman, 1996, p.16. She made this comment on Steen’s s knowledge of painting

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theories and traditions. Alpers, 1972-1973, p.174. 50 Alpers, 1975-1976, p.118. 51 Westermann, 1997, p.99. 52

Quoted in Westermann, 1997, p.100 from Vanden Plasse. See also Stuiveling, 1970, p.

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misconducts of the common man’. In 1638, Cornelis vanden Plasse, the editor of 54

Bredero’s collected works, reviewed a list of ancient comic themes as reading ‘a catalogue of contemporary genre paintings.’ The vivacity, amusement and 55

practicality of comic representation sustained its popularity until the second half of the seventeenth century. This incessant demand for comic images guides us back to the close-knit relationship between artists and their buyers.

The comic attitude unequivocally depends on the engagement of its creator as much as that of its viewers. Similar to comic literature, pictorial comedy provides the most extensive treatment to the amusements provided by the lower social class. With its realistic depiction, it often operates as the crossroad at where the high and low elements of society meet. For the study of children, the higher authority is conferred to the parents while the children are the subjects to be criticised. The parents, who are either inside of the paintings as some of the characters or outside as viewers, react to the children in the pictures. This owes to the prerequisite realism of genre paintings: the paintings render as phenomena within particular circumstances. The pictures at one point enable the parent viewers to play out of all the questions as the occasions for letting-go since those misbehaved are not really their children. At another point, they can reflect their relationship to the events within the work of art, revising their treatments towards their children by putting themselves in the shoes of the characters. Therefore, Steen rarely illustrated a situation of children alone without any adult companies. Every Steen’s version of ‘As the Old Sing, So Pipe the

Young’ (Figures 19-21) and The Dissolute Household depicts both the children in

folly and the parents drinking and enjoying transient pleasure. These paintings reveal not only attitudes towards the children in the society, but also propose to their viewers how to raise their children. The amusing chaotic scenarios are the semblances for the serious parenting advices.

Such device of comic tradition inset in Steen’s style indicates ‘the different types of childhood portrayed in paintings through the centuries may have more to do with changes in art rather than changes in the way children were seen.’ 56

Notwithstanding that Christian ideology about children had circulated in Europe for

Bredero, 1890, Preface. See also Westermann, 1997, p.100.

54

55

Pollock, 1983, p.47.

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thousand years, the pictures of children as the comic laughable did not come into view till early modern period. Examining ‘backward’ from the artistic and cultural context to the art production is thus necessary if we have to comprehend why children were always in folly in comic paintings. Steen’s mode of representation cannot be appropriately interpreted without reckoning its relation to his predecessors’ works. There has been a long respected convention for painter to learn from the works of great masters in the past. Steen was most probably alert of the current of artistic metamorphosis genre and comic paintings undertook. These wholesale changes steered the thematic and stylistic development in terms of representational transformation for every pictorial subject. Although there are 57

lacunae in the existing biographies of Steen, impeding us to recapture his entire life, we can still survey his strong kindred with Haarlem’s artistic tradition through his teacher and other master comic painters.58

Master comic painters before Steen

Netherlandish writers produced anecdotes to enliven the biographies of artists and to encapsulate their artistic traits. Art historical scholars always entitle Steen to be the seventeenth century inheritor of comic tradition, especially of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Albeit Steen was not the student of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, his residence in 59

and near the city of Haarlem would not isolate him from the works of this ‘inventor’ of peasant genre and comic moralising. In the sixteenth century, comic mode was 60

considered as modern mode of representation —low-life object with low mode. A traditional comic view of low-life paintings seemed to be the one and only for representing a low-life subject. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, named as ‘Pier the Droll’ by Karel van Mander, reinterpreted a topos of peasant, the lowest in the social hierarchy, with his peculiar artistic invention. During his time, there was a bloom of interest in peasants and their customs. Artists instigate to ravel about Europe, collecting and compiling costume-books in order to display the native costumes of various countries. They grasped the proverbs in the vernacular, extended an

Franits, 1996, p.9. Steen’s teacher Adriaen van Ostade’s art effectively adopted the

57

typically iconographic approach into genre images. Westermann, 1997, Chapter 2.

58

Westermann, 1997, passim.

59

Chapman 1996, p.16. Steen had interest in the Northern tradition of comic moralising,

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apprehension about the culture which these artists including Bruegel believed to be indigenous. His comic interpretation of peasant life subsequently laid on a vein of distinctively mixing of seriousness and play, characterised the best comedy of the sixteenth century. At first sight, his subtle artistic mode problematically simplified peasants into objects of fun. Delving deeper in his composition and pictorial details, his peasants were transformed into a stock of emblems about sins with the masquerade of comic attributes. In this way, he settled the bedrock for the basic 61

comic qualities of the peasant, both adults and children, in the seventeenth century Netherlandish art.

Bruegel’s mode of representation obscured the margin of true-to-life imitation and comic style. He weaved the ethnographic, iconographic and artistic attributes into one of his renowned works Children’s Games. (Figure 6) On an opened town square connecting to another side of the town with a wide road, children filled almost every single inch of space, twisting their bodies, hopping around and playing more than ninety different games. This encyclopaedic collection of games is comic because its

mise en scène sets in a world without adults. The artist bestows on the children, a

low subject, enormous authority to overrule the town by turning the town into their playground. The disproportion of their bodies to their heads maintains the Medieval form of depicting children as little adults, exemplifying their subordinate status in the society. Children in the Medieval and Renaissance historical and religious paintings very often act a minor role except being infant Jesus and angels. Bruegel’s direct, almost brutal vision alludes to a strongly spiritual affinity with a disapproving conception of human nature: if children take charge of the world, they will turn it over into a chaos. This attitude targets at neither admiring or condemning the children as the low-life yet testifying the ‘real’. The medieval idea contended the children’s inclination to behave wildly and so adults have to ‘domesticate’ them, otherwise, they would merely know to indulge in pleasure seeking and troublemaking. This scene initially is full of fun and laughters; its moral is a discreet reminder of the concept of children as uncivilised adults. This peasant figure-type at the beginning popularised in the Bruegelian circle soon dominated in the early and mid-seventeenth century. Even though there is no source to support that this is the first image positioning children on a primary role, it stands for an important precedent in the long tradition of the children’s folly.

Alpers, 1972-1973, p.176.

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One of the Bruegelian followers was Adriaen van Ostade, teacher of Steen. 62

Resembling Bruegel’s subject, van Ostade’s art revolved around the everyday life of peasant. Differently, he approached it with more familial notions, which had actually originated during the preceding century. He probed into the roles and spaces of gender, developing the normalcy of socially-constructed masculinity and femininity as an urban condition in the Dutch Republic. The peasant family shown in his etching Boerenfamilie bij het slachten van een varken (Figure 7) demonstrates how a man is responsible to actively carry out duty for his family. In this example, the father uses his physical strength to control the livestock on the ground in order to feed the woman and children. From his hunching posture and muscular left arm, it is obvious that he engages intensely in the activity. This is again a representation of the low life for the middle class viewers. Seeing the slaughter of livestock in a rural open backyard is a spectacle raising their curiosity about the life of their poor counterpart which amuses the higher class audience as a rare scenario. But their curiosity did not restrict to such semi-public activity. The private life of the peasant enticed even more consumers. The most remarkable contribution of Van Ostade and his brother Issac van Ostade to the comic genre is the use of large interior spaces. The pranks of picturing the household space lays on the intrusion of masculinity, an antipode of chastity and purity to a traditional womanised space. In Dans in de 63 herberg (Figure 8), men and women are dancing and touching each other. Furniture

is messed up. The woman setting on a chair on the left appears to be a mother is neglecting the child and distracted by the man standing closed by. Interpreting Van Ostade’s prints, Wayne Franits provided a helpful perspective to assess the artist’s peasant depictions. He endeavours in showing how social and cultural notions determine the conventional themes, and hence related evolving notions privacy, civility and domesticity to ‘an implied audience’. The subject and mode of representation that Van Ostade chose encode the expectations of the audience who wanted to seek amusement in the private of peasant family.64

Houbraken named Nicolaes Knüpfer, an artist who had resided in Leiden for a time, to be

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Steen’s master. 1718-1721, Volume 3, p.13. But as De Groot said, Steen showed no trace of Knüpfer’s style of painting, his influence on Steen was very minimal. 1908, p.1. So it is more appropriate to refer to Adriaen van Ostade, whose works clearly left marks in Steen’s early peasant paintings. Weyerman, 1729-1769, p.348. See also Chapman, 1996, p.16.

Salomon, 2004, p.47.

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Franits, 1996, p.14.

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Steen inherited the comic traits of Bruegel and Van Ostade: he painted children of mischief in an interior household space. Nurtured by comic circumstances, his earliest paintings stand squarely in the traditional comic and anecdotal genres of the peasant kitchen, the rustic doctor and the rural festivity on the modest comic foundations. By the early 1660s, Steen already reinvented the comic characters of displaying the inappropriate childish with derisive and sarcastic comments within the urban interior. Houbraken commented Steen’s painting The Scholar and Death (Figure 9) as a farcical invention ‘if he had borrowed the models for them from the Madhouse; one could not look at it without laughing.’ The almost mental disorders 65

become unproblematic subjects for laughter. The child holding an hourglass next to the scholar performs the symbolic role of transience while another boy, who does not to recognise Death, shows it where the scholar is. Even children are playing a minor role supporting the adult protagonists, the little boy already demonstrates the concept viewing children with folly and foible of not knowing. His comic paintings keep the same characters as those of Bruegel and Van Ostade. The amusement gains from laughing at the unknown, or even mischievous low-life subjects, not limited to peasant but children in general.

Steen’s comic paintings intimate Protestant concept of soul

Why were children part of the low-life subjects in seventeenth century Netherlands? On which ground did Steen and other comic painters find children hilarious? The answer comes from the concept of the Dutch adults about the soul of children. The Protestant had a strong hold on the idea of original sin. They justified the demeanours of children —tended to be undisciplined, annoying and disturbing people — with an evilness innate in their souls. In their concepts, people were evil before they were born. A Nuremberg catechism underlined that unborn babies in the womb had ‘evil lusts and appetites.’ English Protestant reformer Thomas Becon in 66

1550 replied to the question ‘What is a child, or to be a child?’: ‘A child in scripture is a wicked man, as he that is ignorant and not exercised in godliness.’ So that children were counted into unruly men, those owned of misdeeds. In their hearts, they seemingly had a liking for endless list of misbehaviours — adultery, fornication, idol

Houbraken, 1718-1721, Vol.3, p.18.

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Tudor, 1984, pp.393-394. Under Cranmer’s authority in England, the German catechism

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worship, quarrelling and more. Their souls were teemed with cynical feelings and impure desires.67

Based on such belief, it would not be surprising if Steen depicted children’s mischief for his Protestant clients. The stereotypical view on music-making exemplifies this difference in perceiving the souls of children and adults. Music was a motif of multiple meanings in the early modern Dutch culture. On one hand, it symbolised transient, sensual pleasure of Vanitas; on the other hand, the tonal concordance music presented denoted the harmony between people, especially couple and family. Children Teaching a Cat to Dance (Figure 2) shows four children stay around a table in a room enjoying music. The girl wears a yellow bardot top with ribbon rimmed and glittering sleeves and a silken blue skirt. Attentively playing the recorder on her hands, she is captivated in her own world and does not realise her improper posture. Sitting on the table and opening her legs, despite her decent dressing and young age, she looks a symbol of misdeed. This is most probably underscored by her red hair tie and stockings. However, none of the others gives notice to the girl’s charm. Instead, they all indulge in making fun of the cat: the boy wearing a red fedora drags up the cat’s arms, forcefully teaching it to dance like a human on two legs. The cat shows a painful face. The other two children, rather than stopping him from hurting the cat, seem to enjoy it like a spectacle: one laughs blatantly, pulling the cat’s tail as the other offers the cat his pipe. The dog also appears as amused as the children. To condemn this unacceptable scenario of bully, an old man pokes out his head from the window, who vents his dissatisfaction less of the noise the children making, more of their unruly behaviours, which owes very likely to their original sin.

At contrast, Steen drew a scene of adult music-making nearly 1660, A Young

Woman Playing a Harpsichord to a Young Man.(Figure 5) The lady playing the

harpsichord dresses almost the same as the girl playing the recorder: a frilled yellow bardot top and silken blue skirt. She does not show her stocking nor have a red hair tie. She is as captivated as the girl, concentrating on performing her harpsichord in front of the young man. He is attracted by the music. Without uttering any sounds, he just leans on the harpsichord and gazes at her fingers, allegedly too anxious to miss any harmony each tiny movement she makes. In the corridor leading to this charming chamber, a boy carries a lute approaching the door. It seems the young

Ozment, 1983, p.164. Ozment translated and quoted from a German sermon in 1520s.

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man is going to join the lady, enriching the harmony atmosphere. Although also of music-making, there displays no disapproval against any characters. Referring to the inscription on the instrument, on the green cover, it reads a quotation from the Bible: Acta Virum/Probant meaning ‘actions prove the man’. As a scene of passive flirtation that the couple do not even exchange any glances, this functions not only as a ironic comment but also affirms that adults are capable to control themselves against evil lusts and create harmony. Demeanour manifests soul. Steen put another comment on the couple’s soul on the harpsichord says Soli Deo Gloria, literally ‘Glory to God alone’. Unlike the children teaching a cat to dance, the grow-ups are not the subject to be laughed yet to glorify God. There is naturally a long way for the evil children to transform themselves into adults like this peaceful couple.

Comic moralisation for Protestant education

If the children were born to be evil, the Protestant parents would want to mend these little beings. Education came doubtlessly forth to their mind. To purify the infant humans, the Protestant, especially the Puritan, advocated the idea for the need of salvation. Infant baptism ensured no route to salvation. Solely faith could save them. Adults should bring them consciously of the necessity of salvation as early 68

as possible. John Robinson, the pastor for the Pilgrim Fathers, advised ‘a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon.’ There were two major functions of education. As a matter of political 69

concern, education was necessary for the established order to maintain uniformity in curriculum and seek methods or assets benefited the state and the individual. As a matter of religious concern, it was a means of catechising the masses since salvation was only possible with knowledge for people to comprehend the minister’s sermons. It ensured a learned ministry and the religious welfare of the children. To 70

enforce these motives, they referred to the holy book. The Bible sanctioned a view that parents had to command their children and children had to honour and obey

Quoted in Ozment, 1983, pp.164-165. The motto was ‘God might infuse the gift of faith in

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to the soul of a child’.

Quoted in Demos, 1970, pp.134-135.

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Durantini, 1979, pp.110-111.

The evil versus the innocent: the representation of children in Jan Steen’s paintings and the seventeenth century religious concepts in the Dutch Republic

Universiteit van Amsterdam

Graduate School of Humanities