The Merry Family
Jan Steen (1626 to 1679) · 1668
A family sits around a table and everybody is making noise. The father raises a glass and sings, the grandmother reads the words from a sheet of paper, a fiddler plays, the mother lifts her glass, and the children have joined in with a flute, a pipe and a great deal of shouting. A small boy at the window smokes a clay pipe, a girl gives a toddler a sip of wine, and the floor is strewn with mussel shells and a broken egg. Hanging from the mantelpiece is a note with the proverb that explains everything: as the old sing, so pipe the young.
Jan Steen was the great comic painter of the Dutch Republic, and his disorderly households became a Dutch phrase for any chaotic home. But look how carefully the chaos is arranged. The figures form a rough circle around the table and every gesture leads the eye to the next, the colours are balanced in reds, blues and yellows, and the light from the window on the left picks out the grandmother's paper and the father's glass. Steen paints textures with relish: the pewter, the earthenware jug, the fur trim, the folds of the tablecloth. The grinning father is, as often, the painter's own face.
The moral is plain and cheerful at once. Children copy their parents, so a family that drinks and smokes and sings will raise children who do the same, and Steen lets us laugh at the household while seeing the warning. Seventeenth century Dutch buyers loved these paintings precisely because they were both funny and improving. The picture came to Amsterdam's city collection through the Van der Hoop bequest in 1854 and has been on loan to the Rijksmuseum since 1885, where it hangs among the Golden Age masterpieces as proof that the age was not only solemn.
Did You Know? In Dutch a messy household is still called a Jan Steen household, after paintings like this one.
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