BE 207
JAN STEEN
1626 - Leiden - 1679
A man offering a pipe to a young woman
Signed lower left: JSteen
Panel: 16 x 12 ¾ in / 40.7 x 32.2 cm
In a neoclassical, carved and gilded wood frame, Sparre frame type 4, numbered 44.
Painted circa 1659-61
Provenance:
Count Gustaf Adolf Sparre (1746-1794), Sahlgren-Sparre Palace, Gothenburg or Kulla Gunnarstorp, near Helsingborg, Sweden;
his widow Elisabeth Sparre, née Ramel (d.1830), Kulla Gunnarstorp
by inheritance with Kulla Gunnarstorp to her grandson Gustaf Adolf de la Gardie (1800-1833);
his father Jacob Gustaf de la Gardie (1768-1842);
by whom sold circa 1840 to Count Carl de Geer, Leufstra;
his granddaughter, Wanas, Sweden;
by descent
Exhibited:
Stockholm, Bukowski, Äldre mästares, 1884, exh. cat. by O Granberg, no.177
Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, Holländsks Mästare I Svensk Ägot, 1967, p.102, no.151
Kristianstad, Kristianstads Museum, Ur Gustav Adolf Sparres konstsamling pa Wanas, 1977, no.34
Literature:
Inventory of Count Sparre’s collection made after his death in 1794, no.11
O Granberg, Catalogue raisonné des Tableaux dans les collections privées de la Suède, 1885-6, no.51
Göthe, 1895, p.35, no.58
C Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. I, London 1907, p.216, no.798
O Granberg, Inventaire Générale des Trésors d’Art....en Suède, vol. I 1911, vol. II 1912, no.423
ST Kjellberg, Slott och Herresäten i Sverige. Skane, vol. 3, Malmo 1966, p.346
I Hasselgren, Konstsamlaren Gustaf Adolf Sparre 1746-1794, Göteborg 1974, pp.113, 120, illus. p.188
K Braun, Alle tot nu toe bekende schilderijen van Jan Steen, Glarus/Rotterdam 1980, p.100, no.112, illus. p.101 (as whereabouts unknown)
In his rich oeuvre, Jan Steen often depicted interiors with two protagonists: couples in love, unequal lovers or, quite often, a young lady and a doctor in conversation about the consequences of an adventurous love affair. In this painting, it is about the overtures of a young man with unruly curly hair, offering of a Gouda pipe to a young woman sitting on a chair, an empty wineglass in her hand. The man, standing behind a table, is paying all his attention to the lady, who in her turn is leaning away and seems to ask the onlooker for advice. A bed in the background confirms our suspicion that the young man is hoping for further results from his approaches to the woman. In the well-known Doctor’s visits the bed is almost always there and evidently belongs to the story Steen is telling. Steen, by the way, more often uses the glance out of the painting to involve the onlooker in the story. In one of his greatest masterpieces, The toilet from 1663, in the collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Steen is, in an extremely subtle way, playing a game between the girl on the edge of her bed in the painting and the onlooker, by blocking the way of the viewer with objects of vanity on the threshold of the door leading into her room. The sexual implications in the painting under discussion are unmistakable. Wine and tobacco were known in the seventeenth century as risky delights. On the other hand, there were quite a few expressions about pipes with sexual connotations, like ‘een pijpje stoppen’ (filling a pipe) or ‘zijn pijpje uitkloppen’ (knocking out one’s pipe). A similar combination of a glass and a pipe may be noted in The amorous old man, a painting in a private collection in England, in which a female servant is warding off a man who is forcing a glass of wine on her, while a second man, while filling his pipe, is smiling at the viewer.
Steen did not use the scene just to demonstrate the obvious attention of a young man towards a girl. He also used his painting to show off his know-how as a painter. He certainly wanted to impress his customers with his abilities, such as the rendering of the white fur used to set off the girl’s jacket, the details of the chair, with copper nail-heads and sculpted lion-heads, the tangibility of the white clay of the Gouda pipe and the highlights which make the pewter can on the table look real.
The bravura of the painter is best demonstrated by the hair of the man. With great speed Steen defined the wild wealth of hair of the man with the tip of the brush, a brilliant detail that immediately demands the viewer’s attention. A second peculiarity of Steen’s technique can be noted here too. Often the artist first painted the background, leaving open a reserve for more essential passages. After finishing these foreground figures, he filled in the background in a rather careless way. Here, Steen probably painted the unruly hair of the man at a rather late stage and subsequently covered the background around it, leaving quite a good deal of space uncovered. Especially on the right hand side, near the man’s left shoulder, this phenomenon is more than evident. Generally speaking, Steen probably would have spoiled the effect of the freely painted hair, if he had meticulously covered all this open background.
As so often with Jan Steen, connections with other paintings can be pointed out. The gesture of the girl might be expected in other compositions, with a doctor feeling the pulse of a sick lady, as for instance in The doctor’s visit at Apsley House. There are however far more striking formal similarities with Steen’s painting in het Muzeum Narodowe in Warsaw, Choice between Age and Youth (‘What you seek, I seek too’), where a girl has to make up her mind between an old suitor offering money, and a young man holding a recorder. With the very similar gesture of her right hand, the girl seems to respond to the offer of the old lover.
Although there are very few obvious indications as to the dating of this picture, we may assume that Karel Braun’s suggestion of around 1659-61 is correct. Steen’s technique of including a nervously painted passage with the tip of the brush, as he did with the man’s hair in this painting, supposedly was introduced in the 1660s. This would imply that this painting is one of the earlier examples of this working method.
Wouter Th. Kloek
Note on provenance
This painting was part of the distinguished group of works amassed by Count Gustaf Adolf Sparre (1746-1794), who built up one of the finest collections of Dutch and Flemish Old Masters put together in eighteenth century Sweden. An exact contemporary of King Gustavus III (1746-1792, reigned 1771-92), Sparre was part of the flowering of French Enlightenment ideas which influenced art and architecture as well as politics in Sweden.
Gustaf Sparre was born on 6th January 1746 into a wealthy Gothenburg family which had been ennobled in the Middle Ages. His father Rutger Axel Sparre (1712-1751) was a Director of the Swedish East India Company and his mother Sara Christina Sahlgren (d.1766) was from a prominent and cultured Gothenburg merchant family. Their marriage in 1740 brought great wealth into the Sparre dynasty.
A week after Gustaf’s birth, the Sahlgren house, facing Stora Hamngatan and its canal, was destroyed by fire. Gustav’s grandmother, Brigitta Sahlgren, commissioned a superb neoclassical house on the same spot from Bengt Wilhelm Carlberg (1696-1778), Gothenburg’s leading architect. The Sahlgren-Sparre Palace has recently been restored.
Aristocratic Sweden looked to Paris as the leader in the arts. Financed by his grandmother, who delighted in his interest in the arts, Gustaf Sparre made a Grand Tour of northern Europe from 1768 to 1771, beginning in London, then visiting Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, where his diaries record a deep fascination with altarpieces by Rubens and van Dyck and early Netherlandish masters such as Memling. He made extensive notes on the Cabinet of Willem V in The Hague and the collection of Jan and Peter Bisschop in Rotterdam, forming the intention – unusual among his countrymen, who preferred French and Italian pictures – to collect the Dutch and Flemish school. Sparre spent three years among the most fashionable set of young Swedes in Paris. He was friendly with the cultured Count Gustaf Phillip Creutz, Swedish Ambassador to France, and had his portrait painted by the Swedish-born Alexander Roslin, who also memorably portrayed Gustavus III.
The death of his grandmother brought Gustaf back to Sweden in 1772. He and a cousin inherited from her the Sahlgren-Sparre Palace. Gustaf had his part remodelled in the latest light and graceful Gustavian style, probably by the Court architect Jean Eric Rehn. Fifty-eight of the hundred paintings Sparre had collected were housed in two drawing rooms on the first floor. They were placed in charming neoclassical giltwood frames of four different types, probably also designed by JE Rehn to complement the decoration. The pictures were hung in symmetrical groups with a common vertical centre line, with pendants arranged at the sides.
Sparre began to buy Dutch and Flemish pictures on his first visit to the Netherlands and at auctions in Paris during his stay there. From 1779-80 he was again in Paris as the guest of Count Creutz. He acquired an Isack van Ostade, a Jordaens and Gerard Ter Borch’s Stable (J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) at the Poullain sale in 1780.
Although he bought Hondecoeters and two Rembrandt portraits (one in the National Gallery, Washington DC and one in a private American collection), Sparre’s taste was mainly for Dutch and Flemish cabinet pictures, including works by Jan Brueghel the Elder, Metsu and Teniers. Such exquisite works were much sought after both in the Netherlands and Paris in his day. He also bought paintings by Chardin and Greuze, in keeping with the strong French influence of the Gustavian style in architecture.
In 1775 Sparre bought a country house, Kulla Gunnarstorp, and married Elisabeth Ramel (d.1830) in 1777. He moved some of his collection there and died there in 1794. The Sparres’ only child to survive infancy, Christina (1778-1811), predeceased her mother and Kulla Gunnarstorp and its collection was inherited by Elisabeth’s grandson Gustaf Adolf de la Gardie (1800-1833). He died childless and the estate passed to his father Jacob Gustaf de la Gardie, who sold it in 1837 to Count Carl de Geer. Around 1840 the picture collection followed. In 1855 Count de Geer sent most of the paintings to his granddaughter at her house at Wanas in southern Sweden, where they remained until 2007.
JAN STEEN
1626 - Leiden - 1679
Jan Steen was one of the greatest of Dutch genre painters, exploring the follies and vices of human life with wit and tolerance. He is also among the most magical of painters: of figures, still life, shimmering cloth, dogs, candlelight or the distant landscapes which make up his teeming canvases. Apart from modern-dress genre scenes - usually with a moral sting in the tail - Steen produced a small number of portraits, as well as Biblical and history paintings.
Steen was born in Leiden in 1626 to a cultivated upper-middle-class Roman Catholic family; his father was a brewer. Steen may have studied with Nicholaus Knupfer in Utrecht and Adriaen van Ostade in Haarlem, before being registered as a master painter in Leiden’s Guild of St Luke in 1648. The following year he married Jan van Goyen’s daughter Margriet; he had probably worked as van Goyen’s studio assistant.
From 1649-54 Steen pursued a successful career in The Hague. He moved to Delft in 1654 and leased the Snake brewery, probably because of a slump in his painting business. In 1658 he was back in Leiden, moving after a few months to nearby Warmond. In 1660 Steen moved to Haarlem and embarked upon the most productive years of his career, joining the Haarlem Guild in 1661. In 1669 Margriet died, leaving him with about eight children and a chaotic ménage - not unlike the ones he used to paint - which has gone down in history in the Dutch phrase ‘a Jan Steen household’.
In 1670 Steen inherited a house on the Langebrug in Leiden from his father and moved back to his home town. When in 1672 war precipitated an art market crash, he opened The Peace tavern, where he was happy to drink with such artistic cronies as Jan Lievens, Arie de Vois and Frans van Mieris. The following year Steen married Maria van Egmond, a widow who made her living selling boiled sheeps’ heads in the market. Three of Steen’s numerous children became artists. Steen, having lived life to the full, died aged fifty-three in 1679.