Jan Steen "At the Hostelry" and at the Metropolitan Museum

Whereas the above portrait of Steen helped Melville to imagine the appearance of the tavern-owner who hosts the subsequent discussion among Old Master painters in “At the Hostelry,” the six engravings from his work that illustrate the thirteen-page essay on his life and art give specificity to Steen’s claim, near the end of the colloquy, “puffing at his skull-bowl pipe serene,” that in matters of artistic representation, “All’s picturesque beneath the sun!” The engravings after works by Steen in the opening essay of Works illustrate very well “the life that’s wine and brine, / The mingled brew; the thing as spanned / By Jan who kept the Leyden tavern / And every rollicker fellowly scanned” (NN BBO 161-62).  

The small untitled engraving under the portrait of Steen above depicts an indoor setting in which four figures and one dog comfortably take in light and air through the spacious windows. The six featured engravings include The Young Gallant (a courtship scene in which the young gallant enters the home of a young lady, adult onlookers, and a dog); The Parrot (in which a young lady reaches up to a parrot as men are playing a board game and a boy eats on the floor), The Dancing Dog (in which a dog dances on his hind legs in a courtyard as eleven people watch); Grace before Meat (in which a little girl learns to pray as a dog licks a bowl); The Aged Invalid (in which six people and a cat satisfy their own needs as well as those of the aged invalid); and The Skittle Players (an outdoor game near an outdoor picnic in a wooded setting) (Works, 1: 1, 4, 5, 8, 9. 12, 13). Below is the engraving of The Dancing Dog from Melville’s copy of Works (fig. 2); the same painting was engraved for the chapter on Steen in Melville’s copy of The Figure Painters of Holland (Gower, facing p. 51). 

Besides his access to engravings of Jan Steen and six of his paintings in the lead essay of the two-volume copy of The Works of Eminent Masters that Melville acquired in 1871, Melville would also have had access to two oil paintings by Steen that were part of the Metropolitan Museum’s Original Purchase in 1871, were reviewed by Henry James as part of the inaugural exhibition in 1872, and were exhibited in the Old Eastern Gallery Y while Melville was still revising “At the Hostelry” during the last year of his life (these paintings were nos. 12 and 66 in the Hand-Books for the exhibitions beginning in November 1890 and in May 1891). The extreme range of these two paintings in both subject and tone illustrates Steen’s declaration in Melville’s poem that “All’s picturesque beneath the sun.”  

Steen’s Dutch Kermesse (figure 3) is a convivial peasant festival scene whose subject and tone resemble those of Teniers’ Peasants Dancing and Feasting, a companion acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum, as The Marriage Fair, in 1871. Its subject and tone also resemble those of Le Ballet Rustique Flamand, the engraving after a similar painting Teniers in Melville’s own print collection. Steen’s Dutch festival scene was about the same size as Teniers’ Flemish counterpart (no. 10 and 61 in the 1872 Catalog of the Pictures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art). 

Henry James in 1872 saw the above painting as a “strong specimen” of Steen’s “vivacity.” He considered this Dutch Kermesse, in which we see “the usual boors footing it below the usual tavern,” to be remarkable for the figure of a buoyant wench, with flying cap-strings, tossing her head to the music, and shaking her skirts with admirable spirit and glee” (761). After being deaccessioned by the Metropolitan Museum and auctioned by Sotheby's in 1982 (see Baetjer 2004, no. 127, p. 230), Steen's painting was auctioned by Lempertz in 2013 (as Peasants Making Merry in Front of a Tavern). Her vivacity would have been much more visible in the large oil painting than in the small black and white photo here, documenting the deaccession of the painting in 1982, when it was auctioned by Sotheby’s .   

Steen’s An Old Rat is Trapped at Last (figure 4) is entirely different in subject and tone. This complex, disturbing domestic scene struck Henry James as a “strong specimen” of Steen’s “crudity.” 

James considered this to be “a finer piece of painting” than Steen’s Dutch Kermesse, and he was struck by its originality: “as frank a treatment of a coarse subject as often finds its way upon the canvas.” He is also impressed by “the strong handling of the mass of tumbled bedclothes which occupies the foreground, and the broad realization of the face, such as it is, of the Dutch Molly Seagrim, who figures at heroine in the episode.” But “never was a certain redeeming grace more brutally dispensed with. This is more than an ugly picture; it is an offensive act. It makes one think more meanly of the human imagination” (761).  

Steen’s depiction of what appears to be the interruption of an indoor rape or seduction scene contrasts in the strongest possible way with the convivial vigor of his outdoor Kermesse. Here too it would be helpful to have a color reproduction of the painting, but this canvas was deaccessioned by the Metropolitan Museum in 1980, when it was auctioned by Christie’s as a painting by Richard Brokenburgh (Baetjer, 2004, no. 127, p. 236). Melville, nearly a century earlier, would have had no reason to think An Old Rat is Trapped at Last was not by Steen. Contrasting this work with A Dutch Kermesse in the Old East Gallery Y when revising “At the Hostelry” would have given him a strong sense of the range of Steen’s conception and execution of the “picturesque.” 

Melville’s deployment of Jan Steen as the host of the colloquy about the picture among the Old Masters in “At the Hostelry” is notable for several reasons. One is that Melville appears to have acquired no prints after paintings by Steen (though he did have access to engravings after Steen in his copies of The Works of Eminent Masters and The Figure Painters of Holland, as well as potential access to the two oil paintings at the Metropolitan Museum discussed immediately above). Making Steen the host of Melville’s colloquy in a hostelry or inn is not surprising given that Steen ran such an institution himself and was notably sociable with the variety of painters who congregated there, activity well documented in the Works essay. What is notable, however, is the respect Melville gives to Steen’s intellectual range, far beyond what would be expected of a tavern owner famous for painting primarily low-class genre scenes.  

Melville does endow Steen with the qualities generally ascribed to him in the nineteenth-century: “convivial, frankly gay”; “jolly is Jan . . . who kept the Leyden tavern.” But he also shows him “puffing at his skull-head pipe” with “fellowly, yet thoughtful mein.” Melville’s Steen is “a sapient spendthrift in shabby raiment, smoking his tavern-pipe and whiffing out his unconventional philosophy” (all italics mine). Moreover, Melville’s Veronese, immediately after hearing Steen explain why “All’s picturesque beneath the sun” on “art’s canvas of truth,” “swerved” himself around, surprised “to mark a prodigal so profound, / Nor too good natured to be wise” (NN BBO 152, 161-62).  

By representing Steen as not only “thoughtful” but “sapient,” and by having Veronese recognize him as “profound,” Melville was echoing a recognition of Steen’s intellectual range and imaginative power that was emerging in mid-nineteenth-century England. One example appears in the commentary on the first page of the essay on Steen in Melville’s 1854 copy of The Works of Eminent Masters (figure 1 above). Steen may have “lived at the ale-house, and ended by turning his own dwelling into a tavern,” but this should not blind us from seeing that “he was also a philosopher, a profound and acute observer, and able to raise himself, without effort, to the conception of beauty.” Those who had “concerned themselves too much with what took place in his household . . . did not rightly comprehend what passed in his mind” (Works, 1-1). The chapter on Steen in Melville’s 1880 copy of The Figure Painters of Holland also begins by declaring that “few painters have suffered as much at the hands of their biographers.” Gower notes that Steen’s creation of nearly 500 “authenticated works” is “alone sufficient to refute the charge” that he was “more of a drunkard than a painter.” Gower also credits the work four recent researchers who have begun to establish “the true facts of his life—so far as they are known” (49). 

Walter Liedtke’s evaluation of Steen’s career for the Metropolitan Museum in 2007 benefited from more than a century of additional scholarship. He noted that Steen’s keen critique of society “was achieved through a sharp appreciation of comic theater, popular literature, and sympathetic artistic sources” ranging from Lucas van Leyden and Pieter Bruegel the Elder to Jacob Jordaens and Franz von Mieris.” In addition, Steen’s “compositional schemes and manner of execution are also remarkable for their responses to other artists, who included those cited above and such diverse talents as Adriaen Brouwer, Gerard ter Borch, and Gabriel Metsu” (2: 835-36). Steen’s sociable manner, intellectual and societal range, and wide appreciation of the achievements of  other artists made him the ideal host and spokesman for examining all that’s picturesque “beneath the sun” in “At the Hostelry.” Those same qualities also made him the undeniable symbol for The Embarrassment of Riches in Simon Shama’s comprehensive 1987 Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (passim). 

Melville’s artistic deployment of thirteen Dutch and Flemish artists in “At the Hostelry” draws upon the prints of 21 Dutch and Flemish artists he preserved in his own print collection; original paintings by most of those artists he had seen in public or private collections in England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and New York City; illustrated essays about nearly all of these artists in the two-volume addition of The Works of Eminent Masters that he acquired in 1871; and the commentary about many of those same artists in other art books in his library, including Gower’s Figure Painters of Holland, Cundall’s Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland, Mollett’s Rembrandt, and Hazlitt’s Criticisms of Art (Sealts nos. 564, 233, 169, 363 and 263a). 

Because Melville was depicting many of his Dutch and Flemish artists in “At the Hostelry” as picturesque persons as well as artists of the picturesque, the engraved portraits that appeared that introduced the essay devoted to each artist in Works would have been extremely helpful. In addition to the engraved portrait that opened the essay on Jan Steen (figure 1 above), we have also seen the engraved portraits opening the essays on Rubens, Rembrandt, Brauwer, and van Ostade.  Later in this chapter, we will see the engraved portraits from Works of other Dutch and Flemish painters whose persons he depicted in “At the Hostelry,” whose artistry he collected in his print collection, and whose original paintings he would have been able to see on the walls of Metropolitan Museum as its art collection, like his, continued to grow.