Jan Steen

Ms. Pickersgille-Cunliffe, London;

Anonymous sale, Paris, Palais D’Orsay, 13 June 1978;

Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 23 May 1986, lot 24;

There acquired by the family of the present owner. 

Probably C. Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné..., vol . 1, 1908, p. 231, cat. no. 852.

In the eighteenth century Jan Steen was considered a dissolute painter of low-life scenes, a reputation that carried over into popular imagination until very recently. Steen was, in fact, a far more complicated man and artist, and his paintings are sophisticated commentaries on life and society in the later seventeenth century. He was known for his merry companies, set in family homes, inns or brothels, but while the ostensible subjects were of people enjoying themselves, the real themes were often deception or sexual intrigues, or both, and the compositions were often inspired by his Dutch and Flemish predecessors of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

This particular composition is a variation on the brothel theme popularized in the Netherlands earlier in the seventeenth century by artists such as Dirck van Baburen (see Museum of Fine Arts, Boston inv. no. 50.2721) and Gerrit Honthorst. These artists had in turn drawn upon the pictorial and literary tradition of the "ill-matched couple" popular in the Netherlands since the sixteenth century. But while traditional depictions of the ill-matched couple were construed as moral warnings against foolishness and deception, the images of brothels produced by Baburen, Steen and their contemporaries were often more ambiguous.

The laughing, inebriated figure at the center of the composition, and the victim of a slick brothel robbery is a self-portrait of the artist himself. Steen, who often inserted his own face into his scenes of everyday life, usually displays himself as a willing and comical participant rather than a moralistic admonisher. Steen's second occupation after painter was as a brewer and innkeeper, and he repeatedly depicted himself within the tavern or brothel as a protagonist of temptation and transgression.