Children Teaching a Cat to Dance, Known as ‘The Dancing Lesson’

Jan Steen made his name on scenes exactly like this, so much so that a messy, chaotic home is still called 'a Jan Steen household' in Dutch. Children have hoisted a cat onto a table and are trying to make it dance to the squeal of a shawm, an old reed instrument that was the ancestor of the oboe. The cat is howling, a dog barks below, and the children are delighted. Only the old man leaning in at the window disapproves, and in a Steen picture that disapproval is half the joke. Paintings of ordinary life like this sold well in a prosperous 17th-century Holland that liked to laugh at its own bad behaviour. Today it hangs in the Gallery of Honour of the Rijksmuseum, among the grand set-pieces of the Dutch Golden Age.