Background notes

MEETING - Wednesday 21 May 2008  : Jan Steen: A Dutch painter and Story-teller in the Seventeenth Century

Jan Steen was born in Leiden, probably in 1626. He is amongst the most popular painters of the Golden Age in his native country, yet relatively unknown abroad, and undeservedly so. A near contemporary of Vermeer, Steen (d.1679) painted a prodigious number of works, from portraits to biblical scenes, but most of all genre paintings - the area in which Vermeer excelled. Yet unlike Vermeer, whose works are seemingly understated and serene, Steen's genre scenes are usually boisterous and full of telling details. He depicts disorderly households in which slovenly housewives get drunk, young children steal from their mother's purse, dissolute older husbands try to seduce young maid servants, and love-sick daughters are visited by quack doctors. In this he found a successor in William Hogarth a century later. These were the works that established his reputation; so much so that people have often confused the scenes in Steen's work with the painter's own lifestyle, all the more so because he often depicted himself and his family as participants in these scenes. As a result, a proverbial household in chaos is known in Dutch as a 'Jan Steen household'. Although the painter often included moralising symbols that warn of punishment and retribution, the lasting impression that his works usually convey is one of humour and joie de vivre. In this lecture, we shall be looking at Jan Steen the artist, his work, and his reputation.

Some suggested reading:

Brown, C., Scenes of Everyday Life: Dutch Genre Painting of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1984).

Chapman, H.P., W.Th. Kloek, A.K. Wheelock, Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller (Zwolle, 1996)

Franits, W., Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution (New Haven/London, 2004).

Haak, B., The Golden Age: Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century (transl, London, 1984).

Jongh, E. de, Questions of Meaning: Theme and Motif in Dutch Seventeenth-century Painting (Leiden, 1995, transl. 2000).

Kirschenbaum, B.D., The Religious and Historical Paintings of Jan Steen (Oxford,1977).

Slive, S., Dutch Painting 1600 to 1800 (revised and expanded edn, New Haven/London, 1995)

Schama, S., The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London, 1987)

Westermann,M., The Art of the Dutch Republic 1585-1718, Everyman Art Library (London, 1996)

____ The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century (Zwolle, 1997)

Biographical details

Sophie Oosterwijk was born in Gouda ( the Netherlands) and studied English at Leiden and Medieval Studies at York. She obtained her PhD in the History of Art at the University of Leicester in 2000 with a thesis on the image of the infant in medieval culture in north-westem Europe, which is due to be published as a book in 2008. She has published a large number of essays on different aspects of medieval art and iconography in a variety of journals and books. Her latest research project is the danse macabre in late-medieval art and literature. In 2003 Sophie was elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. She is also the Hon. Editor of the journal Church Monuments She took up a temporary lectureship in History of Art at the University of Leicester in 2006, where she is also the Acting Director of the Centre for the Study of the Country House. She has previously been employed as a lecturer in medieval art at the University of Manchester and as a free-lance researcher and lecturer for the universities of Cambridge and Leicester, Sotheby's Institute of Art, NADFAS, the V&A Museum, and other organisations. Medieval, Early Netherlandish, and Dutch seventeenth-century art are her special subjects, and her particular interest is placing art in its social and historical context.