Self-Portrait

Jan Steen usually put his own grinning face among the drunks and quacks of his crowded scenes. Here, around 1670, he paints himself as a gentleman, in black, before a red silk curtain with a heavy tassel and a balustrade opening onto open country. That was how a respectable citizen was shown in a portrait, following the example of Titian and Rembrandt. He did not get there easily. When the canvas was restored in 1995, the museum found that Steen had reworked his eyes, his mouth and the position of his arm, and changed the collar three times. He started wide, tried a cravat in the fashion of around 1668, then went back to the plain white band you see now. The restoration also brought out the view behind him, which recalls the work of his father-in-law, the landscape painter Jan van Goyen.