A Woman at her Toilet

A Dutch viewer in 1663 would have read this small panel like a puzzle, because Jan Steen built it as one. He frames the scene inside a stone archway hung with a sunflower and a grapevine, old signs of constancy and domestic virtue, and then sets behind that threshold a very different room, where a woman sits on her bed pulling on a red stocking and gives us a frank, inviting look. Around her Steen scatters the language of vanity, a skull, a candle just snuffed out, a lute with a broken string. Even the stocking is a joke, since the Dutch word for it doubled as coarse slang. King George IV bought the picture in 1821, most likely enjoying the wit more than the warning.