Jan Steen

In Dutch, a chaotic, rowdy home is still called a Jan Steen household, een huishouden van Jan Steen. The phrase comes straight from the painter's own comic scenes of family life gone off the rails, and it has outlived almost everything else about him in popular memory.

Steen knew that world from the inside. Born in Leiden around 1626 into a Catholic family of brewers, he ran taverns himself at various times, and his pictures are full of drink, disorder, sly glances and misbehaving children. He was one of the great storytellers of the Dutch Golden Age, and left behind hundreds of paintings.

The laughter usually carries a lesson. A collapsing, over-indulgent household was a warning to his 17th-century viewers about where easy pleasure leads, and Steen often planted small clues, a wasted coin, a child already learning bad habits, to make the point. He liked to paint himself into the middle of the mess, grinning, as one of the worst-behaved figures in the room.