Jan Steen

About Jan Steen

Who is it?: Genre Painter
Birth Year: 1626
Birth Place: Leiden, Dutch
Education: Nicolaes Knupfer
Known for: Painting
Movement: Dutch Golden Age painting

Jan Steen

Jan Steen was born on 1626 in Leiden, Dutch, is Genre Painter. Jan Steen was a famous Dutch genre painter, born in the seventeenth century. His paintings were marked by chaotic abundance of color. He drew his subjects mainly from the daily life around him. Born in a family of tavern keepers, it was natural that many of his paintings had tavern as a background. Merrymakers were one of his favorite subjects while families too were frequently portrayed in his works. However, he also looked beyond the real world and drew inspiration from the contemporary stage. Many of his paintings were also based on mythological, religious and historical subjects. However, in each of them, one can decipher an ethical message hidden beneath an inherent sense of humor. What is more, there are few artists who are as prolific as Jan Steen was. He painted more than eight hundred pictures, out of which three hundred and fifty have so far been traced. He did not have any known student, but his works have inspired many. Well known genre painter, Richard Brakenburg, is considered to be one of his followers.
Jan Steen is a member of Painters

Some Jan Steen images

Biography/Timeline

1649

In 1648 Jan Steen and Gabriël Metsu founded the painters' Guild of Saint Luke at Leiden. Soon after he became an assistant to the renowned landscape Painter Jan van Goyen (1596–1656), and moved into his house on the Bierkade in The Hague. On Oct 3, 1649 he married van Goyen's daughter Margriet, with whom he would have eight children. Steen worked with his father-in-law until 1654, when he moved to Delft, where he ran the brewery De Slang ("The Snake") for three years without much success. After the explosion in Delft in 1654 the art market was depressed, but Steen painted A Burgomaster of Delft and his daughter. It does not seem to be clear if this painting should be called a portrait or a genre work.

1654

Steen was born in Leiden, a town in Southern Holland, where his well-to-do, Catholic family were brewers who ran the tavern The Red Halbert for two generations. Steen's father even leased him a brewery of his own in Delf from the years 1654 until 1657. He was the eldest of eight or more children. Like his even more famous contemporary Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Steen attended the Latin school and became a student in Leiden. He received his painterly education from Nicolaes Knupfer (1603–1660), a German Painter of historical and figurative scenes in Utrecht. Influences of Knupfer can be found in Steen's use of composition and colour. Other sources of inspiration were Adriaen van Ostade and Isaac van Ostade, Painters of rural scenes, who lived in Haarlem. Whether Steen actually studied with Ostade is not known.

1656

Steen lived in Warmond, just north of Leiden, from 1656 till 1660 and in Haarlem from 1660 till 1670 and in both periods he was especially productive. In 1670, after the death of his wife in 1669 and his father in 1670, Steen moved back to Leiden, where he stayed the rest of his life. When the art market collapsed in 1672, called the Year of Disaster, Steen opened a tavern. In April 1673 he married Maria van Egmont, who gave him another child. In 1674 he became President of the Saint Lucas Guild. Frans van Mieris (1635- 1681) became one of his drinking companions. He died in Leiden in 1679 and was interred in a family grave in the Pieterskerk.

1662

Jan Steen's connection to theater is easily verifiable through his connection to the Rederijkers. There are two kinds of evidence for this connection. First, Jan Steen Steen's uncle belonged to the Rhetoricians in Leiden, where Steen was born and lived a substantial part of his life. Second, Jan Steen portrayed many scenes from the lives of the Rederijkers, an Example being the painting Rhetoricians at a Window of 1662–66. The piece is currently held in the Philadelphia Museum of Art which was established in February 1876. The humanity, humour and optimism of the figures suggest that Jan Steen knew these men well, and wanted to portray them positively.

1945

In 1945, Sturla Gudlaugsson, a specialist in Dutch seventeenth-century painting and iconography and Director of the Netherlands Institute for Art History and the Mauritshuis in The Hague, wrote The Comedians in the work of Jan Steen and his Contemporaries, which revealed that a major influence on Jan Steen's work was the guild of the Rhetoricians or Rederijkers and their theatrical endeavors.

2014

Steen was prolific, producing about 800 paintings, of which roughly 350 survive. His work was valued much by contemporaries and as a result he was reasonably well paid for his work. He did not have many students—only Richard Brakenburgh is recorded—but his work proved a source of inspiration for many Painters.

2017

It is often suggested that Jan Steen's paintings are a realistic portrayal of Dutch 17th-century life. However, not everything he did was a purely realistic representation of his day-to-day environment. Many of his scenes contain idyllic and bucolic fantasies and a declamatory emphasis redolent of theater.

2019

Steen's numerous paintings of a theme most commonly entitled The Doctor’s Visit, such as the composition of 1665–70 in the Rijksmuseum, illustrate his theatrical approach. The story is simple: a Doctor attending a young maiden discovers that she is not ill but is in fact pregnant with child. The Doctor is a comical character who wears a biretta, a doublet and a small pleated ruff. In fact, he is dressed in the fashion of 1570, not 1670. In contrast, the girl wears what would be the height of fashion at the time of the painting, a Japanese-styled loose kimono robe.

Jan Steen trend