The Happy Family

Here a whole household has come apart at dinner. The parents sing and drink, a grandmother lifts her glass, and the children copy them exactly, one puffing a pipe, another reaching for wine. Look up at the mantelpiece and you find a slip of paper with the proverb that explains the scene, ‘As the old sing, so the young pipe.’ By 1668 Jan Steen was keeping a tavern in Leiden as well as painting, and he knew a rowdy room when he saw one. Dutch viewers read pictures like this for their lesson. The disorder is the joke and the warning at once, that a father who wants well-behaved children should watch what he does at his own table. Steen liked the subject enough to paint versions of it more than once.