Jan Steen (1626-1679)  As the Old Ones Sing the Young Ones Pipe – The Mauritshuis, The Hague

The Dutch have a common saying: describing an untidy and disorganized home they call it a “Jan Steen House”. Steen (1626-79) was an artist who specialised in painting those sorts of subjects, and became the most prominent of a school of low-life genre painters in the Netherlands, influenced by their great sixteenth-century predecessor Pieter Breughel the Elder.  He was born in Leiden, a large and thriving merchants’ city, and spent some time in Vermeer’s Delft, where he must have looked hard at the paintings of another Delft artist, Pieter de Hoogh: scenes sometimes of orderly family life in sunlit parlours and courtyards, sometimes showing men and women drinking and flirting.

Steen didn’t confine himself to low life. Every class of Dutch society comes in for his commentary. And although he delighted in the muddle and confusion of a disorderly household, he always brought a firm analytical eye to bear in his subject matter. This picture of rollicking entertainment in “merry company” is nothing like as muddled as it at first appears. In fact, it is one of the most elegant illustrations of compositional organisation that I know. The whole jolly scene is inscribed in an oval, beginning top left with the curve of the parrot’s back, following through the arm of the servant pouring wine, down through the hat-brim of the laughing man, and round the arm of the chair to the dog’s head and back, leading to the arm and head of the woman holding up her glass. There’s a strict geometry here that keeps the riotous scene under rigid control.

But that’s only the skeleton of the picture. It’s a good deal more meaty than a pattern of lines, however subtly conveyed. The title tells us that this is the illustration of a traditional Dutch adage: “What the oldsters do, the youngsters will imitate.” Many pictures of the period, from Brueghel onwards, take proverbs and moral maxims for their subject matter. The musical theme is borne out by the bagpiper at top right – and he is the only figure outside the charmed oval I’ve described. He represents the “piping” of the adage, and is the “background music” of the scene, adding to the chat and laughter of the group. In the centre a mother is cradling her baby, a picture of the intergenerational care we hope will be a model for everyone.

Another youngster, though, is receiving a different kind of attention: the boy on the right is being given a puff on a meerschaum pipe (a pun on the musical pipes?) by a laughing man in a feathered, wide-brimmed hat. Is the older generation leading the young astray, or simply sharing the good cheer? It may be significant that the laughing man is a portrait of the artist himself. Steen often introduced his own likeness into his pictures, usually as a jolly, expansive character enjoying himself and helping others to enjoy themselves too. In the end he was rather too self-indulgent and ended his life in poverty.

If he wasn’t able to discipline himself, he was quite capable of drawing a sterner moral in his work: Dutch society, soberly Protestant and aware of its obligations towards others and to God, was governed by a mass of proverbs and moral tags like the one in the title of this picture. They drew attention to human frailty, to the temptations of money, drink and sex. Steen used his pictures, with their immaculate finish, lively characterisation and vivid realism, to make these moral precepts entertaining and so more effective as guides to the ordered life. He was never a solemn preacher, and would have been delighted that his pictures today are valued as some of the most vivid accounts we have of Holland in the heyday of its mercantile prosperity.