Re-identifying a Jan Steen

In a brilliant piece of art historical detective work, two Dutch academics have solved the puzzle of Jan Steen’s 1655 painting The Burgomaster of Delft and His Daughter. The work does not depict a burgomaster, but the merchant who supplied grain for the artist’s brewery. We also now know about a bitter ­marital row which lay behind the apparently placid figures of the father and his daughter.

The story suggests that Steen and his friends did indeed live up to the description given by the artist’s early biographer, Arnold Houbraken, who wrote in 1721: “His paintings are like his life, and his life like his paintings.” Even today, in the Netherlands a chaotic home is called “a Jan Steen household”.

Posted by David on March 14, 2007 1:41 PM