Lot 13
  • 13

Jan Havicksz. Steen Leiden 1626 - 1679

bidding is closed

Description

  • Jan Havicksz. Steen
  • A Country Wedding
  • signed lower right JS(in ligature)teen
  • oil on canvas

Provenance

Marinus de Jeude, The Hague;
His sale, The Hague, April 18, 1735, lot 24, for 130 florins;
Anonymous sale, The Hague, April 24, 1737, lot 7, for 140 florins;
Anonymous sale, The Hague, June 20, 1810;
Yperen;
Héris, Brussels;
His sale, Paris, Bonnefons de Lavialle, March 25-26, 1841, lot 34, for 2800 Francs;
Lemaître, Paris;
His sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, March 5, 1874 (as signed and dated 1677);
Otto Adam, Berlin, by 1906;
Emil Goldschmidt, Frankfurt am Main;
His sale, Berlin, Lepke's, April 27, 1909, lot 38 (as signed in monogram and dated 1677), for 20.000 Marks;
Susskind, Amsterdam or Stockholm;
With Schaeffer Gallery, New York;
Swiss Art Market, 1934;
Sale, London, Sotheby's, July 3, 1963, lot 77 (as signed in monogram and dated 1677) for £2,800 to de Boer;
With P. de Boer, Amsterdam, 1965;
Ch. de Roy van Zuydewijn, Heemstede, by 1966;
With K. & V. Waterman, Amsterdam, by 1985

Exhibited

Delft, Prinsenhof, Oude Kunst- en Antiekbeurs, Summer, 1965.

Literature

A. Bredius, Jan Steen, Amsterdam 1927, p. 52, reproduced;
C. Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, Vol. I, London 1908, p. 131, no. 488 (as signed and dated 1677);
E. Trautscholdt in Thieme-Becker's, Allgemeines Lexikon, Vol. XXXI, 1937, p. 512;
K. Braun, Jan Steen, Rotterdam 1980, p. 110, no. 176, reproduced p. 111 (as dateable circa 1662-66);
Tableau 8, No. 3, December 1985, reproduced on the cover. 

Catalogue Note

The country wedding was a subject which Steen depicted in numerous variations and which enabled him to render the kind of depiction of popular culture for which he is so justly famous.  The large scale of this work is characteristic of the artist’s paintings on canvas after he moved with his family to Haarlem in 1660.  Another painting of similar size and subject matter from this period is The Dancing Couple, signed and dated 1663, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Karel Braun (see Literature) dates this painting to circa 1662-66.  In some of the previous sales and early literature (see Provenance and Literature), this painting has been mistakenly listed as dated 1677.  As Braun points out in his 1980 monograph, this seems to have been due to a mis-reading of the letters "teen", following the "JS" monogram, as the date "1677".