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Lot Essay
This little-known panel, remarkable for its near flawless state, is one of the finest exterior tavern scenes painted by Jan Steen. Its refined handling, crisp atmospheric qualities, and selective lighting all suggest a date in the first half of the 1650s, when Steen was emerging in Leiden as the most gifted and original genre painter of his generation. He had registered as a master-painter there on 18 March 1648 and while no records of his apprenticeship and training exist, it is now generally accepted that he studied under Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685). The Heywood-Lonsdale picture lends weight to this assumption, not only in terms of the idyllic vision of rural life that it imparts, but also on account of its composition, which is based on a strong receding diagonal, very much in the vein of the elder artist. Steen was no doubt also influenced by Jan van Goyen (1596-1656), whose daughter, Margriet, he married in The Hague on 13 October 1649, and in this work, the luminous, billowy clouds and stippled application of the leaves against the sky owes a clear debt to his father-in-law.
The superb state of preservation allows for an unusually vivid appreciation of Steen’s technical brilliance in his keen depictions of common folk revelling in the countryside. Several groups of figures, strategically distributed to establish a sense of depth, appear within the courtyard of a ramshackle country inn, with a dovecote perched precariously on its roof. It seems that Steen was as much interested in the rendering of the figures and their interaction as he was in the detailed observation of surfaces – brick, cloth, wood, foliage – and the different ways in which they responded to light. The two men in the foreground are playing beugelen, a game in which the goal was to strike a heavy leaden ball through a ring using a stick. They stand in the partial shadow of a crooked tree, whose leaves are sharply silhouetted against the bright sky. A soldier in a bright red jacket and slouch hat with a rapier at his side looks on, his evident intoxication conveyed not only by the jug in hand but by the amusing detail of his hat having fallen so as to cover his eyes. Several other figures talk, smoke, and watch with varying degrees of interest from beyond the enclosed playing field. In the right background five people can be seen carousing around a table, their collective mirth conveyed by a portly man who, mouth agape, raises his glass.
Throughout his career, tavern life was one of Steen’s favourite subjects and he repeatedly returned to the theme of people merrily playing games outside in order to capture the carefree mood of a day off. Although it is tempting to read such an apparently natural scene as an actual description of life as Steen saw it, the Heywood-Lonsdale picture more likely presents a selective view of reality, carefully designed to appeal to the city dwellers’ nostalgic yearnings for the simplicity of festive rural life. Such scenes were increasingly popular among the Dutch Republic’s burgeoning middle and upper-middle class urban clientele, affirming their viewers’ civility when compared with the activities of the countryfolk.
The superb state of preservation allows for an unusually vivid appreciation of Steen’s technical brilliance in his keen depictions of common folk revelling in the countryside. Several groups of figures, strategically distributed to establish a sense of depth, appear within the courtyard of a ramshackle country inn, with a dovecote perched precariously on its roof. It seems that Steen was as much interested in the rendering of the figures and their interaction as he was in the detailed observation of surfaces – brick, cloth, wood, foliage – and the different ways in which they responded to light. The two men in the foreground are playing beugelen, a game in which the goal was to strike a heavy leaden ball through a ring using a stick. They stand in the partial shadow of a crooked tree, whose leaves are sharply silhouetted against the bright sky. A soldier in a bright red jacket and slouch hat with a rapier at his side looks on, his evident intoxication conveyed not only by the jug in hand but by the amusing detail of his hat having fallen so as to cover his eyes. Several other figures talk, smoke, and watch with varying degrees of interest from beyond the enclosed playing field. In the right background five people can be seen carousing around a table, their collective mirth conveyed by a portly man who, mouth agape, raises his glass.
Throughout his career, tavern life was one of Steen’s favourite subjects and he repeatedly returned to the theme of people merrily playing games outside in order to capture the carefree mood of a day off. Although it is tempting to read such an apparently natural scene as an actual description of life as Steen saw it, the Heywood-Lonsdale picture more likely presents a selective view of reality, carefully designed to appeal to the city dwellers’ nostalgic yearnings for the simplicity of festive rural life. Such scenes were increasingly popular among the Dutch Republic’s burgeoning middle and upper-middle class urban clientele, affirming their viewers’ civility when compared with the activities of the countryfolk.