File:Steen Effects of Intemperance.jpg

(b. 1626, Leiden, d. 1679, Leiden)

The Effects of Intemperance 1663-65 Oil on wood, 76 x 106 cm National Gallery, London

Even today a 'Jan Steen household' is what the Dutch call a boisterous and ramshackle family. Jan Steen painted many such families, often including his own portrait as a pipe-smoking, beer-drinking, cheerful rake. His prolific output, during a career when he was constantly on the move from town to town, and the very high quality of much of his work, should make us beware of a literal interpretation of this raffish portrayal of the artist. One of the many Dutch seventeenth-century painters who remained Catholics, Steen is a moralist, but he relies on popular proverbs, the popular theatre and festive customs to preach through laughter at the human comedy: people like ourselves behaving as they shouldn't.

Not all his paintings are of this kind. E.g. the landscapelike Skittle Players outside an Inn, which despite its subject seems to make no disparaging comment on the people taking their ease in the summer sunshine, or a late Two Men and a Young Woman making Music on a Terrace, which anticipates the eighteenth-century painter Watteau's lyrical and melancholy compositions. Steen also painted biblical and mythological subjects and portraits. While many of his pictures are small; the Effects of Intemperance is on a larger scale and demonstrates the broader touch he may have learned from Hals during his nine-year stay in Haarlem.

The woman on the left is that most reprehensible creature, a Dutch housewife and mother who is not teaching her children virtue. She has slumped in drunken slumber, her clay pipe slipping from her hand. The little coal brazier by her side threatens to set fire to her gown, and her child is picking her pocket. Above her head hangs a basket in which the fate of those who grow up without parental guidance is foretold: it contains the crutch and clapper of the beggar and the birch of judicial punishment. Another child illustrates a Dutch proverb by throwing roses (we would say 'pearls') before swine, while the trio to the right waste a good meat pie by feeding it to a cat. The parrot, that mimic of human behaviour, is drinking wine given to him by the maid, as luxuriously dressed as her mistress and almost as tipsy, while in the arbour beyond a man, perhaps the father, is dallying with a buxom girl - 'wine is a mocker' indeed, as the saying goes.

Just as the ancient painter Zeuxis painted grapes so realistically that birds came to peck at them, so may we, attracted by Steen's ravishing still life in the foreground, the glow of pewter and the shimmer of silks, be drawn to taste his wares. Through looking deep into his picture, we may yet reform our ways and so avoid the effects of intemperance.

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Author: STEEN, Jan Title: The Effects of Intemperance Time-line: 1651-1700 School: Dutch Form: painting