| Jan Steen was one of the most versatile Dutch seventeenth-century painters and the most determinedly comic. By placing Steen within the artistic, literary, and economic culture of the Dutch Republic, this dissertation details how he became a comic painter and why his paintings appealed to a broad middle-class audience. A comprehensive analysis of Steen's market in Leyden, Haarlem, and Amsterdam demonstrates the particular interest of his pictures of traditional festivals, unruly households, and titillating seductresses for his viewers.;A full account is given of Steen's creative relationship to a wide range of comic literature and theater, from the highest reaches of wit to the coarsest motifs of jokes. Although Steen occasionally rendered specific texts, his forging of visual equivalents for the strategies of literary comedy appears more wide-ranging and innovative. His frequent self-portraiture in compromising situations has numerous literary and theatrical parallels, for example, both in its variety of forms and in its multiple functions, from claiming witness status to fashioning a fictional self with tantalizing ties to the artist's lived life. The specifically pictorial character of Steen's comedy is explored further through an analysis of his realist devices that create lifelike disorder and a charting of his witty rivalry with predecessors and contemporaries such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Adriaen van de Venne, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and the tradition of "fine painting." In the process, terms are offered for seventeenth-century understandings of archaism, stylistic versatility, and originality.;In some of his wittiest paintings, Steen blurred the boundaries between the traditional genres of painting, infusing history with the liveliness of genre and individualizing portraiture through recourse to narrative and still life. Drawing on the early modern theory and practice of rhetoric and tragicomedy, the dissertation proposes historicized readings of Steen's notoriously unconventional portraits and history paintings. An epilogue traces Steen's historiographic ascent to the status of culture hero by 1900, and suggests how his lionization circumscribed modern understanding of Steen's culturally grounded comedy. |
