The Paintings

Steen was a talented and creative thinking painter. He never really focused on one style of painting, but constantly was changing and adapting his quality, even though this did not always work out for the better. To date, Steen is known to have painted around four hundred works, only about forty of which are actually dated. One thing, though, that stays consistent throughout his body of work is his attention to details, for he loved to add the most miniscule things to where every inch of the painting was full.

Steen also was a great storyteller, in a small frame he could make you laugh about a situation that everyone experiences and at the same time display the harshness that is reality. Throughout his work there is a large variety of lively scenes that took on many different subjects. Steen enjoyed using amateur actors from his local theaters, with costumes and all, in his paintings. Also, if looking close enough, it is possible to identify Steen and his family, from where he has hidden them in many of his paintings. Steen being the comedian that he was would often put many different themes into one painting, which could range from obvious to totally obscure. To help aid in distinguishing the main theme of the painting, he usually would include a very descriptive title.

Styles of Works

Genre

Landscape

Portraiture

Religious

Very few portraits are known to be made by Steen. One of the main reasons for this is that Steen is very talented at painting a scene that looks like you could go outside and witness it right then, because of his genre paintings skills, but this has made it difficult to distinguish his portraits from his large collection of genre paintings.

In his early years, Steen spent some time doing landscape scenes, his best known being The Winter Landscape. These works are beautiful and show how talented he is at portraying a feeling of truly being outdoors. His fall back in this style, though, is he likes to give a prominence to people of all ages and cannot seem to solely focus on the nature scene itself. One of the few later landscape scenes was Skittle Players outside an Inn, a beautiful scene that really showcases Steen’s great skill with small details.

Throughout his entire life, Steen was a devout Catholic. He has produced at least sixty known religious paintings, where many of these were treated with his genre flare and comedic touch. His favorite subject by far was The Marriage at Cana, a painting that he has made around six variations of, which is taken from John 2:1-11. His most unique biblical work was Supper at Emmaus, for it was very personal and original. In this painting he depicts a scene right after the Revelation, where the people seem to be trying to come to grasp with what just happened in a very relatable way. What is also unique is that Christ can only be seen in the doorway as a vanishing apparition.

Steen liked to dabble in many different categories of painting, but at heart he was a genre painter. Genre paintings are taking scenes from everyday life and recreating them in a secular way, while not adding any over the top bells or whistles along the way. Steen has a knack of infusing this flare in every style of painting that he does, making his works much more relatable. He plays on both the good and bad habits of people to portray this feeling, especially drawing from the many different ways that alcohol can be utilized.

Skittle Players outside an Inn. panel. ca 1658-1700. 35 × 28 cm. The National Gallery, London. www.nationalgallery.org.uka

The Marriage at Cana. Oil on canvas. ca 1676. 79.7 × 109.2 cm. The Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena. Wikipedia

The Dissolute Household. Oil on canvas. 42.5 × 35.5 in. ca 1663-1664. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org