Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jan Steen
Dutch; 17th-century
The Hague, The Netherlands: Mauritshuis
75%
The Life of Man. c1665. Oil on canvas
This was the eve of Dutch painting's decline, and what better way to prepare for embalming a tradition than this. Every genre or microgenre or tic or technique of Golden Age art is represented: brothel, tavern, gamblers, musicians, courters, still life (on floor, on wall, on table, on shelf in recess in wall), domestic scenes, children at play, birdcage, tiled floor, oysters. And it's all held together by a fabulously understated trompe-l'oeil curtain, the ultimate symbol of this art's simultaneous proximity to reality and intimate knowledge of its own fiction. Tromp-l'oeil will never not be limited by the shortcuts it takes towards revealing and reveling in the falseness of depiction, but as a component of this work's broader meta-commentary on functions of painting, it takes on a more ambiguous and aesthetically productive character. Is the self-reflexivity of this painting an indication of a hollowness and lack of prospects for his art which Steen was sensing? Sure. But it's as open-ended and inventive as a tocsin could hope to be. (TFS, 2026)
The Hague, The Netherlands: Mauritshuis
72%
The Sick Girl. c1660. Oil on canvas
Steen, a generation younger than Rembrandt, was the harbinger of great Dutch painting's demise. In this work you can practically see him replacing, in real time, the Golden Age's tranquility and relational logic with brusque activity, almost movement for its own sake. It's not a bad painting by any stretch, but its outlandishness registers the mounting exhaustion of a tradition. It therefore (even more than his famous tavern scenes, which can seem somewhat indulgently busy) conveys an unexamined freshness, which is not exactly the same thing as quality. Most notably, Steen's taken the flat-backed convention of earlier Dutch interiors and literally twisted it, rotating his scene halfway so that, instead of receding towards the steady terminus of a wall, we hurtle somewhat endlessly into the corner of the room. The transversals are harsh, the edges of the image precipitous, the central action fixed at the midpoint of an impenetrable diamond. Whereas the space of earlier Dutch interiors typically seemed to be an emergent property of its depicted objects' radiant forces, here every thing seems just now to have been thrown into this room. While the effect is energizing, it foreshadows the breezy motions and general weightlessness of much ensuing kitsch. (TFS, 2026)