A signal example of Vermeer’s sincerity and, inasmuch as it is a portrait, unique, hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. It is the Portrait of a Lady. She is heavy-featured and of homely type, rather resembling the woman in the Rijks Museum picture, The Cook. A white cap tightly grasps her head; a broad white collar, fastened with a tuft of gold braid, falls over her black dress, the cuffs of which are of white lawn. She folds her hands at the waist, one of them in a cream kid glove, trimmed with gold braid, the other suspending its fellow, while she holds a black fan. The face is relieved on one side by greenish-black transparent shadows and wears an expression of dull self-oblivion that is almost poignant and gives to the portrait a grave distinction.
In conclusion, it is worthy of note that Vermeer’s painting-career of scarcely more than twenty years passed from its experimental stage to a full development from which there was no decline. He did not toward the finish lapse from his finest ideals, like Maes and De Hooch, nor mingle pot-boilers with masterpieces in the manner of Jan Steen. He maintained consistently the artistic integrity of a scrupulously exacting conscience.
JAN STEEN
Jan Steen was the chameleon of Dutch painting. Besides genre he essayed portraiture and Biblical subjects; alternated between small and large canvases; at one time suggests a recollection of some other artist, by turns Van Ostade, Terborch, Maes, Metsu, Van Mieris, or even Vermeer; at other times is incomparably himself, and still again not infrequently falls below his own standard. He has left more examples than any other genre artist; for dozens mentioned in old catalogues have disappeared, yet still some five hundred survive. He is numerously represented in public and private collections, yet in so many styles and varieties of quality that his artistic personality is apt to seem evasive, while the impression he arouses is by turns one of enthusiasm, indifference, and resentment.
By degrees, however, his personality emerges, as one becomes conscious of a trait that is shared by all his pictures. It is their liveliness of characterization, exhibited not only in the individual figures, but also in the inventiveness of grouping and in the peculiar vivacity with which the spirit of the scene has been rendered. He is of all the genre artists the supreme delineator of Dutch life among the lower middle classes in the Leyden and Haarlem of his day; depicting it, by turns, with something of the large-heartedness of a Shakspere, the wit and satire of a Molière, and the coarseness of a Rabelais. But in every vein, whether of broad survey or trenchant scrutiny, he is human; for the most part genial in his outlook, and always fresh in observation. It is probably because of this that Waagen characterizes him as “next to Rembrandt certainly the greatest genius among the painters of the Dutch School,” an opinion which is shared by W. Bürger (Thoré), while Dr. Bredius styles him “the greatest genre painter of the seventeenth century, one of the wittiest delineators of human folly, the character painter par excellence.”
The standard, in fact, by which these and other admirers test him, and which must be applied by every one who would reach a just estimate of this many-sided artist, is bigger than that of technique. Steen drew well, but could be slipshod and incorrect in drawing; exhibited an extraordinary gift of improvised and occasionally studied composition, yet could huddle his canvases with a superabundance of material; in one picture would display a fine sense of color, to lose it in another; now would work with a juicy and limpid brushstroke, now in a thin method as dry as brick-dust, and could be indifferent to tonality, while at other times a tonalist of choice distinction. Therefore you cannot measure him as you do a Terborch or a Vermeer, or, indeed, range him for comparison alongside of any of the other genre artists. With them, at their best, the pictorial representation is the chief concern, and they invite you to judge them by their technique. But it is otherwise with Steen. You cannot hold him to so narrow a test, any more than you can Shakspere. Both are technicians who at times throw technique to the winds. You may regret it or resent it; but, to be just, must condone the fact in face of the bigness that looms behind.
The jovial humanity of Steen and the joy that he took in humorous characterization were responsible for the deficiencies he often exhibited as a painter. He would frequently be more interested in the subject than in the technicalities of an artistic problem; which, as we have seen, is precisely the reverse of the attitude that most of the great genre painters came to adopt. They were concerned primarily with the making of a picture; Steen was quite frequently engrossed with the delineation of a phase of life. He was so interested in the story-telling element of the subject that under some circumstances he permitted himself to supersede the pictorial quality of the presentation. This should be frankly recognized in approaching the study of Jan Steen, otherwise by coming upon one or two of his inferior examples we may be led into a hasty depreciation of this great artist.
He belonged to an old respected family of Leyden, where he was born about 1626, his father being a brewer in prosperous circumstances. The son’s name is inscribed in the records of the University of Leyden, as having been one of its students in 1646; then we hear of him as a pupil of Nicolaes Knupfer, the painter of genre and of Biblical and mythological subjects. Afterward Steen studied with Jan van Goyen, whose daughter Margaret he married. He was one of the first members of the local Guild of St. Luke, established in 1648. From 1649 to 1654 he lived at The Hague; then returned to Leyden for seven years, during which time he owned a brewery near Delft. From 1661 to 1669 he resided at Haarlem, but in the last year lost his wife and returned to Leyden, where he remained until his death in 1679. In 1672 he had obtained permission from the magistrate of Leyden to maintain a café at his house, and the following year took a second wife, Maria van Egmont, the widow of a local bookseller. Houbraken states that they lived happily together, though their larder was often ill-stocked; but he is not so charitable toward Steen’s connection with the liquor trade. This fact, coupled with the jovial character of the artist’s pictures and enlivened
