Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Jan Steen Household --- Day 5/220

Walk: Legion of Honor (Homework - 4 Docent Tours)
Distance: 1.5 miles, Home Yoga

Marriage of Tobias & Sarah painting (c1673) by Jan Steen at Legion of Honor Museum. San Francisco, CA.
Jan Steen (Dutch,1626-1679), The Marriage of Tobias and Sarah, ca 1673, oil on canvas, 41 x 50 1/4"

The Dutch revere spotlessly clean, tidy and organized homes. In the thousands upon thousands of interior paintings executed in Holland's stupendous Golden Age, you would be hard pressed to find even a suggestion of dust or disorder. Image result for dutch interior paintings

Except if you were viewing one by Jan Steen. He ranks in Dutch popularity next to Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals - probably because the Dutch also love humor. Steen treated life as a vast comedy of manners, and the warm-hearted, ribald chaos - and downright messiness with a frying pan and greenery strewn around the floor - in The Marriage of Tobia and Sarah was likely comic relief after all the spic and span.

To this day, nearly 400 years after Steen painted, there is a term for a lively, untidy home; they call it a "Jan Steen household."


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