Page:Hofstede de Groot catalogue raisonné, Volume 1, 1908.djvu/27

 i JAN STEEN 3 the continence of Scipio Africanus, the rape of the Sabine women, and the like, and has planned his pictures accordingly. He cares nothing for historic truth or local colour. But when he can introduce a touch of humour he does not refrain ; though his humour, which reflects the manners of his day, often seems very coarse to us. Besides the variety of Jan Steen's subjects, his colouring and lighting and his purely technical skill deserve unqualified praise. When, however, one studies his draughtsmanship, a number of sketchy pictures are to be unfavourably distinguished from the great mass of his works. These sketchy, superficial, and often almost crude pictures, are distributed over the whole of the master's artistic career, and are contemporary with his most finished works. The explanation of this remarkable fact is still to seek. In his rendering of effects of lightj Jan Steen shows a preference for warm and delicately felt light and shade, emphasised by his love of warm yellow and red tones in his costumes, and by reflections in yellow metal, as, for instance, in brass vessels, carved gilt picture-frames, and the like. He uses a vivid brick-red, and with it very often a bright blue, that has unfortunately been employed to excess in several masterpieces, thus weakening the general effect. The artist achieved the perfect representation of materials by means of that careful painting of details, in the best sense of the word, which was/ especially practised in Leyden. Although no piece of still-life, properly so-called, by Jan Steen is known to exist, there are in almost everyone of his pictures draperies, costumes, metal objects, furniture, musical instru- ments, and the like, which may, in point of execution, be compared with the best examples of still-life painting. The landscape backgrounds in Steen's earlier pictures resemble most closely those of Isaac van Ostade, who was of about the same age ; there are the same village-streets going diagonally across the picture streets bordered with trees, between which are seen houses and the roofs and steeples of churches. Steen's trees, too, have the somewhat hard and mannered shapes of the trees in the Haarlem master's paintings. Arrived at maturity, Steen shows more freedom in his treatment of landscape, but he adheres to the convention of irradiating the clouds and horizon with an evening-glow that is regularly repeated. In this respect he resembles most nearly his Amsterdam contemporary, Johannes Hackaert, to whom the landscape backgrounds of Steen's pictures have often, though wrongly, been ascribed. Although nearly fifty dated pictures, between the years 1650 and 1677, illustrate the development of Jan Steen, it is very difficult to sum up the course of his art accurately in a formula. One cannot truly say of Steen, as one can of Rembrandt, that his work was laboured, neat, and full of detail in his youth, and broad and free when he came to maturity. Nor can one say that, like the average artist of that day, Steen began by making his work warm in tone and national and individual in character, and that in his later years his work became cool in tone, smooth in texture, excessively finished, conventional and academic. The problems of Steen's career are deserving of further study.