The Young Violin Player

By 1660 the Dutch Republic was wealthy in a way no court could match, and that money reached the houses of merchants and shopkeepers who wanted paintings of their own. A small panel like this one, only about 40 by 50 centimetres, was made for exactly such a room. It shows a young violin player with a man, a woman, and the remains of a meal, the kind of ordinary evening a Leiden household might really have spent. Jan Steen knew that world from the inside. He came from a brewing family, ran a tavern for a time, and painted crowded, good-humoured, slightly disorderly homes so often that the Dutch still say a Jan Steen household to mean a happy and untidy one. Here the music is not a performance but part of the after-supper ease, a fiddle taken up while the table is still being cleared.