Festive Family Meal

Around 1865 a Paris doctor, Louis La Caze, drew up a list of his pictures and entered this one simply as a composition of 16 figures by Jan Steen, adding that it came from the Reiset collection. Frédéric Reiset was a curator at the Louvre who also collected for himself, and La Caze had probably bought it straight from him. When La Caze died in 1869 he left 583 paintings to the nation, and it was Reiset who sorted them, keeping fewer than half for the Louvre and sending the rest to museums in the provinces. This Steen, which had already passed through his hands once, stayed in Paris.

The Louvre reads the family at table as the five senses, each one standing at the same time for an age of life, from the small child to the old. A bird cage, an old emblem of love, hangs in the room, with a parrot close by, which the French art historian Albert Pomme de Mirimonde called the bird of Mercury, god of all trade. It is a late picture, from around 1674, and a century later it was sold from the estate of a former Amsterdam alderman, Cornelis Backer, at Soeterwoude near Leiden. The museum's own catalogue notes, a little drily, that one 19th-century admirer praised it almost too much.