La Fête des Rois

On the night of Epiphany in the 17th-century Dutch Republic, a cake was cut and whoever found the bean baked inside was crowned king for the evening. Jan Steen painted that custom again and again, and here the winner is a small boy on a bench in a paper crown, being handed a drink he is far too young for. The room is tipping toward chaos. On the floor a man scrapes a rommelpot, a pot covered with animal skin and a stick pushed through the middle, the household noise-maker of these feasts. Steen kept an inn in Leiden alongside his studio, so an evening like this one he knew from the other side of the counter.