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Jan Steen portrayed himself as a self-assured artist, in decorous black, seated against a red curtain and tassel. With this type of self-portrait, Steen followed the example of famous artists such as Titian and Rembrandt. The portrait is an exception in his oeuvre. He usually included himself in other paintings, in a comic role. Photo unattributed –

Top 10 Remarquable Facts about Jan Steen

One of Holland’s best genre painters, Jan Steen, though born and trained at Leiden, must be regarded as an honorary member of the school of Haarlem, for he came under its influence, adopted its technical methods, and there painted his best pictures, including some of the greatest genre paintings of the period.

 He is a link between the older and younger genre painters, less objective than, say,  Adriaen van Ostade (1610-85) and Gerald Terborch (1617-81), and less sentimental than the Mierises.

1. Jan Steen was born at Leiden in 1626

Jan steen, un contadino che cucina. Homem cozinhando, pintura de c. 1650 de Jan Steen. Photo by Sailko –

He was born at Leiden in 1626, studied with an otherwise unknown painter named Knupfer, at twenty was transiently enrolled as a student of letters in the university, and soon went for a short stay at Haarlem, where he inevitably came under the influence of the Halses and Molenaers, and at twenty-two, 1648, was admitted as a master in the painters’ guild of Leiden.

2. His wife was Margaret van Goyen

Travelling couple is watching the landscape. Photo by Aleksandra Sapozhnikova on

The next year he was working at The Hague, where he married the fair Margaret van Goyen, daughter of the famous marine and landscape painter Jan van Goyen. Margaret’s gracious form appears in many of Jan Steen’s pictures.

 In his particular style of Dutch Realism, Steen possibly gives himself too unreservedly to his subject matter, somewhat neglecting pictorial, in favor of human, expression.

3. His themes are usually invested with his own humorous, moralizing, or satirical comment

Jan Steen (1627-1679), Sanger med guitar, 1641-1679. Photo unattributed –

His themes are usually invested with his own humorous, moralizing, or satirical comment. He can at times play the showman, tweaking the beholder’s elbow lest he misses something. Behind his pictures, one feels the genial and quizzical man.

No painter of the Dutch Baroque has studied the relations of children with grown-ups with more insight and charm.

4. Steen conveys infectiously the animation of games and work and family festivals

Mock up to show how a trompe-l’Å“il might be displayed on a window jamb. Photo by Jimfbleak –

He conveys infectiously the animation of games and work and family festivals with eager participants, and he catches equally well some exquisite and unexpected aspects of a solitary figure – as that glimpse of his fair wife about to put on a stocking.

5. Jan Steen is fully aware of the comedy played between half-quack doctors and those who are imaginary invalids

Book 3 of 4-volume painter biographies by Jean-Baptiste Descamps. Photo by Jean-Baptiste Descamps –

Almost alone of Dutch Old Masters, he is fully aware of the comedy played between doctors who are half quacks and pretty women who are imaginary invalids. His was a widely roving eye and sympathy.

Such mobility of temperament is hardly Dutch, as it was hardly Dutch to remain a good Catholic. The Dutch, who, after all, adored him, had their revenge in loading his legend with all the peccadillos and some of the sins.

Here legend has probably made too much of the fact that he was generally in straits and normally convivial. No wastrel can have painted in less than thirty years of activity over five hundred carefully finished pictures.

Before this time he had painted a few coarsely drastic pothouse pictures, probably under the influence of Frans Hals  (1582-1666) in this vein.

6. He had a disturbing acquisition father-in-law

Jan Steen – The Tooth-Puller painting –

The father-in-law was a disturbing acquisition – an excellent and successful painter, he frittered away his gains in speculating in town lots and tulip bulbs. Painting ill-maintained Jan Steen’s rapidly growing family, for in July of 1654 we find him renting a brewery at Delft for five years.

Two years later the father-in-law died, leaving nothing but debts. Still a year later his father, on whose security the lease had been drawn, came to the rescue of the brewery business from Leiden, saving it from bankruptcy. Jan was probably an absentee manager at The Hague.

7. Between 1660 and 1671 was the moment of his prime and his best pictures

Twelfth-Night Feast painting by Jan Steen –

From about 1660 to 1671 Jan Steen painted at Haarlem. This is the moment of his prime and his best pictures. In 1669 his wife, Margaret, died and a year later the apothecary seized all the pictures in Jan Steen’s house and auctioned them publicly to cover a bill of ten guldens.

8. In 1672, he was licensed as a tavern keeper

Jan steen, il menestrello. \photo by Sailko –

After this chagrin, Jan Steen moved back to his native Leiden, where, in 1672, he was licensed as a tavern keeper. The next year he married the widow, Maria van Egmont. His remaining six years seem to have passed in relative tranquillity.

Some money probably came with the widow, and he had excellent personal qualifications as a host. He died in 1679, only fifty-three years old.

9. The instability of Jan Steen’s character is reflected in his fine art painting

Jan Steen painting of the Skittles Players Outside an Inn –

The instability of Jan Steen’s character is reflected in his fine art painting, which is of very uneven quality. In general, his elaborate compositions with many persons are, though carefully studied in detail, crowded and confused compositions.

 His best pictures are those in which the comedy is played by two or three figures. All this suggests that he improvised rather than thought out many of his works.

The earliest genre-style oil paintings by Jan Steen represent bad company without attenuation. The joyous aspect of intoxication is the theme of the Revelers; its beastly aspect is that of Resting Up.

Neither is particularly good, though the latter has beauties of illumination, both illustrated the theme with a drastic and truth-telling emphasis which we shall not find again till the time of William Hogarth.

10. Jan Steen died in 1679 at 53 years of age

Jan Steen paintings . Photo by Rijksmuseum –

The companionableness of Jan Steen’s 17th-century Dutch painting is so obvious that any critical summary, beyond the analysis of his pictures, already given, seems superfluous. It is also unnecessary and ungracious to emphasize his artistic inferiority to such Dutch little masters as Brouwer, Ostade, Vermeer, and Terborch.

Jan Steen died in 1679, at fifty-three, probably reluctant to leave the life which had never failed to interest and amuse him.