Jan Steen straddled too many fences for his own good. Making critics uncertain about where they stand is probably never a good idea. His reputation paid the price, but the fee is fortunately being reimbursed.
A person cannot be too careful about what he becomes famous for. Jan Steen was insufficiently cautious in this regard. Although he painted his own mixture of biblical and classical histories, allegories, proverb paintings and portraits as well as scenes from everyday life, he became one-sidedly famous for the latter only, his genre paintings. This has put posterity on the wrong foot in judging his work.
Jan Steen, The marriage feast at Cana, ca. 1665-70
Oil on panel, 63.5 x 82.5 cm
Dublin, National Museum of Ireland (Presented, Sir Alfred and Lady Beit, 1987; NGI.4534)
As for example in this entry in an 1814 London auction catalogue on:
“Jan Steen, Marriage in Cana
This subject is intended by the painter to designate dignified history, with no less a personage for the main agent than the Saviour. Nothing can be more ludicrous than such a proof of mistaken powers; but considering it as a carousal in Flanders, it abounds in the truth and nature of familiar life incidents, and in the sparkling touches and characteristic finishing of the dresses. We cannot help more than once smiling …”
This was written by someone trying to sell the painting for the highest price. The exhibition opening at the Rijksmuseum on September 29th [1996] – Jan Steen, painter and storyteller – also tries to market the painter. But now the selling points are diametrically opposed to those of 1814. The very same Marriage at Cana that was denied any and all religiosity is now praised in the catalogue (nr. 43) for its “profound theological message.” A panel which then had no higher value than its “familiar life incidents” is now approvingly said to represent “an apology … for the Catholic doctrine of transsubstantiation.” No presumed “proof of mistaken powers” on the part of Jan Steen can hold a candle to the entirely serious comparison in the catalogue of the Marriage at Cana with Raphael’s School of Athens.
It must be admitted that this unlikely opposition can be attributed in part to Jan Steen himself, who indulged in his own variety of gender-bending. Not with sexuality: few other artists are so sure of what makes men men and women women. Steen bends genres instead. In an age when artistic expressions were neatly pigeonholed in traditional categories, he generified his history paintings and portraits and historicized his genre scenes. Every shift in taste between these kinds of painting necessitated a revision in the appreciation of Steen.
The current discussion about the nature and meaning of his work reveals that categorical thinking was not a monopoly of the seventeenth century. We too seem incapable of looking at or interpreting a picture without knowing in which compartment it belongs. The problem does not lie in the meaning of his paintings as such. There is no more internal inconsistency in Jan Steen than in much other seventeenth-century art, with all its anachronisms and its imperfect acknowledgment of the existence of a natural world. Steen’s inconsistencies bother us more than say an angel in a family portrait. You cannot see as clearly in his work where the boundary lies between convention and commentary. You cannot easily feel your way into your own role in the plays with which his paintings are so often compared. Are we onlookers, minor characters or the target of his satire? Is Steen mocking his figures or is he laughing with them at us?
Perhaps the answer lies, unexpectedly, in his family history . Dualistic practical jokes were a way of life among the Steens. What kind of art do you expect from the great-great-grandson (and son: his father played the same trick) of a man named Hawk who named his daughter Dove?
© Gary Schwartz 1996 and 2024. Published in Dutch in NRC Handelsblad, 23 August 1996. Published on the Schwartzlist on 9 November 2024.
The best I can hope for, after Donald Trump’s landslide (re-)election, is something I wish I did not have to hope for. That is, that I and hundreds of millions of other deplorers of Trump are as wrong about him as we were about Kamala Harris’s chances of winning. That the vote of the electorate reflects the wisdom of crowds and that the US and the world will be better off four years from now. Unfortunately, I do not see how this could come to pass if Trump carries out his stated intentions about migrants, tariffs, Ukraine, Israel and, to cut it short, the enemy within. But he does tend to pursue the aims he blares about in the campaign, so my hope is not very hopeful.
For the cessation of bloody Palestinian-Israeli tensions I have no real hope at all. How can the hatred in the hearts of so many on both sides, some of whom have seen loved ones slaughtered, ever be turned into acceptance? What happened in Amsterdam last Thursday has flamed the European dimension of the conflict, which was already smoldering. What I find most incendiary is the reaction, nearly universal in politics and the media, that charges the assailants – unforgiveable and harshly punishable as I find them – with committing a pogrom, manifesting deep-rooted antisemitism, performing the worst atrocity against Dutch Jews since the Holocaust.
Let me explain. The records of the Dutch Center for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI) – do look at them – registered in 2023 a mounting number of antisemitic incidents, peaking at about one a day, in a country of 17 million, some one million of whom are Muslims. More than half of them are “written expressions.” The only physical violence it reported, even after 7 October 2023, concerned schoolchildren and students hitting Jewish classmates while calling them names. This means that the perpetrators, let us assume that they were indeed all young Muslim Dutchmen with roots in Morocco, with all the opportunities available to them, had never before last Thursday harmed a hair on the head of a Dutch Jew. That evening, then, they were after the three thousand Israelis in Amsterdam for a soccer match, some of whom that morning had marched through the streets, tearing down and burning Palestinian flags, and spreading videos on social media showing them chanting not only “The people of Israel live” (as the New York Times said this morning), but also cries like “Fuck you, terrorists. Sinwar die, everybody die,” which is spelled out only on Al Jazeera. Saying this in Amsterdam implies that Dutch Muslims were their enemy, no? If Dutch Muslims saw this as a call to kill them, their feelings will not be very different than those of Dutch Jews who felt threatened.
Believe me, I feel deeply the pain of Dutch Jews. I am one of them. But I do not see how we are helped by a distortion of the nature of events, that is starting to lead to measures that only exacerbate antagonism between groups in our own country.
After posting this column, in the 8 o’clock news on Dutch television, pictures of Israeli supporters were first broadcast, three days after the event. [Correction: four days later. The video below was taken on Wednesday.]
Videos were also shown of Maccabee fans waving straps, in search of people to hit, presumably those who looked like Muslims. This was a day and a half before the attacks on Israelis started.
11 November, from the New York Times: “They largely concur that some Israeli fans stoked anger in the city’s Muslim population by chanting incendiary and racist slogans, including declaring that there were ‘no children’ in Gaza anymore.” A quotation in an op-ed in the Dutch newspaper NRC is clearer about what was being chanted: “there are no schools anymore in Gaza because all the children have been killed.” I’m glad that I was not on the street and had run into a group like that. What would you have done?
The Dutch government has taken what I think is one of the worst imaginable positions in this affair. With the prime minister saying that what happened Thursday is “pure, unalloyed antisemitism,” he is telling the perps, who – please look at the CIDI figures – have never harmed a Dutch Jew, that they are now guilty not of punishing Israelis, which they thought they were doing (quote from an attacker: “Now you feel what it’s like”) but of committing the kind of violence against the Jewish people that is considered a crime against humanity. He has turned the more Palestine-sensitive Dutch Muslims into antisemites. Let’s hope they have the good sense and humanity not to go along with him.
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Interesting article and comments on Trump and racial hatred expressed in Amsterdam. An ugly side of humanity expressed all over the world, sadly. The quieter moments of human kindness expressed daily, one can hope will prevail globally.
However, where is the info on Duifje Havicksdr- Jan Steen’s sister? Just the Hawk/ Dove reference?
With respect,
Yes, Maryann, I’m afraid so. Apologies for having exploited Duifje’s name for rhetorical effect.
Dear Gary ~ Thank you for this thoughtful post, as much for the ambiguities of Jan Steen as for the comments on the re-election of Trump. My wife (from NYC) and I (Swiss-American) are Americans living outside the US (in Canada) and are distressed at the turn of events, in part because we are patriotic (not nationalistic) about the US, in part because tragedies seen from afar are even more vividly tragic, not unlike the ambiguous effects of participation with, or being the objects of, Jan Steen’s insights as you describe them. Thank you also for he corrections about the events in Amsterdam that are hard to discern in the politics of representation in the media.
Thank you, Guy. What you say about the magnification of tragedies afar I have experienced directly in the last days, as family and friends from abroad, reading those scare stories about Jews in the Netherlands, ask me if I am all right. I’m not, but not because I feel threatened.
( corrected version due to a typo in previous submission)
A seemingly plausible analysis of what happened in Amsterdam Gary. It has, however, one glaring weakness. We now know from analysis of texts and emails that the attack on the Israeli football fans was the result of premeditated planning at least a day before. On this basis one cannot put it down to some quasi- justifiable reaction to provocation by Israeli football fans. This was nothing more nor less than a deliberate attack on Jews because they were Jews. The more concerning problem is twofold: the apparently deliberate non-intervention by the Dutch police, replicating similar ‘two-tier’ policing by the authorities in other cities such as London and, secondly, the semiotic such an event represents, a signal to other anti-Semitic groups in other countries that they can, with relative impunity, perpetrate similar racial atrocities against Jews. This is no time to sit on the fence and attempt to appease both sides under the false rubric of ‘ symmetrical provocation’ or hyperbolic distortion. If we don’t call out this profoundly worrying racial attack for what it is we are in danger of allowing a catastrophic escalation of anti-Semitic violence and prejudice in European society.
Believe me, I’m just as worried about the spread of antisemitism in Europe as you are. What I was saying is that tendentious framings of Israeli-Palestinian confrontations (even if the “Palestinians” are surrogates, in this case Dutch Muslims) as classical antisemitism place the emphasis exactly where you don’t want it to be. I too think the attacks were planned. The attackers knew well in advance that Israelis were coming to Amsterdam, and they wanted to get to them. At them, not at Dutch Jews.
What I say and show about the behavior of the Maccabee supporters was not intended to offer “quasi-justifiability” to the attack, of which I wrote that I find it unforgiveable and harshly punishable, didn’t I? But it was them, with their chanting, who provided the attackers with a semblance of justification.
I do question whether this was a “racial attack” or an anti-Israel attack, which the attackers would see as a response to Israeli agression against Muslims.
Please forgive my ignorance. I only heard of these incidents in the Netherlands in this column, since I prefer avoiding bad news in the media. When I read a sentence such as–“This was nothing more nor less than a deliberate attack on Jews because they were Jews”–my immediate reaction is to ask: are all Israeli Jews? Is Israel fighting a Holy War? Is there any way to separate anti-Israel sentiment from anti-Semitism? I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, but what I have heard about this conflict in the past year(s) makes it difficult for me to have much sympathy with Israel as a state. Nor with any faction trying to further their own cause by (also) killing and terrorizing civilians.
Indeed, Jean-Marie, it is increasingly difficult to draw a distinction between objecting to the Israeli war on Gaza and Lebanon and antisemitism. Israel itself, as well as many Jewish agencies abroad, mostly deny there is a difference at all. As I see it, the repugnance Israel elicits at home and in the rest of the world is the price – in violation of international law, loss of moral standing and sympathy, and declining safety for Jews everywhere, let alone tens of thousands of lives – that Israel is willing to pay in pursuit of its illusory aim of crushing Palestinian resistance to its occupation of Palestinian land.