Jan Steen

Jan Steen – Student of Adriaen van Ostade and Dirck Hals; founder of the Lukasgilde

Jan Steen was born the son of a brewer in Leiden in 1626. The Dutch Golden Age offered the talented painter manifold possibilities to develop, and Steen went to Utrecht to apprentice with the German painter Nicolaus Knüpfer and subsequently with Adriaen van Ostade in Haarlem. Although he took further lessons with Dirck Hals, and attended Leiden University in 1646, his apprenticeship was actually quite short, as is occasionally noticeable in his pictures. Throughout his life, Jan Steen worked not only as a painter, but also often as a brewer and landlord and much of what he saw in the taverns and brewery flowed into his paintings. In 1648, Jan Steen was one of the founders of the Lukasgilde (St. Lucas Guild) in Leiden. 

Son-in-law and assistant of Jan van Goyen; movement as a constant

Around one year later in October 1649, Jan Steen joined the household of the Hague painter Jan van Goyen as assistant and son-in-law. Margriet ‘Grietje’ van Goyen bore him eight children and the marriage continued until her death in 1670. In 1653, Steen left The Hague with his wife and children and tried his hand as manager of the ‘De Roscam’ brewery in Delft, without much success. The Steen family went on to commute between Leiden, Warmond and Haarlem, without ever really settling. Jan Steen ran a taverna in Haarlem and painted a considerable number of pictures at the same time. The restlessness he experienced in his life also transferred to his art – but not detrimentally, for it is precisely the agitated, unsteady hustle that give his paintings their dynamism and exert great charm on the viewer. 

Simple motifs for a complex pictorial language; final years in Leiden

After the death of his first wife, Jan Steen returned to Leiden and married the widow Maria van Egmont, with whom he had two further children. In addition to running an inn, Steen dedicated himself above all to art, and became dean of the Lukasgilde, which he had co-founded, and created a notable late oeuvre. In addition to the occasional depictions of biblical and historical motifs, he painted mainly scenes from civic life as he knew them from his own observation. The seemingly familiar milieu served him only as a backdrop to tell his small and great stories. Jan Steen turned fixed expectations on their head and shattered conventional motions often only through small details such as an inappropriate mimic, a meaningful hand gesture, or the appearance of an unexpected figure – sometimes with friendly mockery, sometimes with biting irony. 

The exact date of Jan Steen’s death is unknown, but it is documented that he was buried in his hometown of Leiden on 3 February 1679.