Volume 44, Number 1 · January 9, 1997
Artist of the Floating World
By Ian Buruma
Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller 12, 1997 (first at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., April 28-August 18, 1996)
Exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, September 21, 1996-January
Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller
catalog of the exhibition, by H. Perry Chapman, by Wouter Th. Kloek, by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.
National Gallery of Art/Rijksmuseum/Yale University Press, 272 pp., $50.00
I can remember clearly the first time I fell in love with a painting. When I was about eight or nine, my aunt, a professional painter of children's portraits, took me to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. We saw Rembrandt's Night Watch, of course, and my aunt pointed out that although this was the most famous painting in the world, Rembrandt's Staalmeesters—the Syndics of the Drapers Guild—was actually a much finer work. She always said things like that. She was forever spotting fakes too: fake Titians, fake Rembrandts, fake Rubenses. Perhaps she was right about the Night Watch. Then again, overfamiliarity makes it hard to judge the quality of a great icon. (Is Van Gogh's chair better than his sunflowers? Maybe.) We ambled through the rooms of maritime paintings by Willem van de Velde—gallant little Dutch ships blasting away at British galleons—which I liked a great deal. But then came the painting that truly grabbed my imagination, more than the Night Watch, or even Van de Velde's naval battles: Jan Steen's The Feast of St. Nicholas, painted around 1665.
Review, 4486 words
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