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Jan Steen (1626-1679), The Worship of the Golden Calf, c 1671-1672, Dutch. Oil on canvas. 178.4 x 155.6 cm. Courtesy of the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh (http://www.ncartmuseum.org); purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina.

More than 300 years after his death, Jan Steen (1626-1679) is still identified primarily as a genre painter of Dutch middle- and lower-class life. In sharp contrast to the calm, ordered interiors of his contemporaries, Pieter de Hooch, for example, or Jan Vermeer, Steen's pictures show the tidy Dutch life gone awry: messy kitchens, drunken scullery maids, lazy housewives, unruly children, even the bedlam of tavern interiors. Indeed, when the Dutch wished to describe a disordered household, they used the phrase "a Jan Steen household." Moreover, because Steen's father had been a brewer and Steen himself was an innkeeper, biographers assumed the paintings were autobiographical, that Steen himself was . . . [Full Text of this Article]