Study of a Man Playing Skittles / Recto: Study of a Seated Man Smoking a Pipe

The Hague, c. 1650 - c. 1655

Object data

black chalk, with red chalk; verso: black chalk, with some grey wash; framing lines in graphite or pencil (partially trimmed)

height 156 mm × width 134 mm

Inscriptions

inscribed on recto: lower right, in an early nineteenth-century hand, in graphite or pencil, Jan Steen
stamped: lower left, with the mark of De Vos (L. 1450)

Technical notes

Watermark: None

Condition

Slightly damaged along left border; some light brown stains

Provenance

…; collection Jacob de Vos Jbzn (1803-1878), Amsterdam (L. 1450); his widow, Abrahamina Henrietta de Vos-Wurfbain (1808-1883), Amsterdam; sale, Jacob de Vos Jbzn, Amsterdam (C.F. Roos et al.), 22 May 1883 sqq., no. 501, fl. 25, to the dealer R.W.P. de Vries, Amsterdam;¹ …; donated by the Vereniging Rembrandt to the museum, 1888

Object number: RP-T-1888-A-1514(V)

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

The artist

Jan Steen (Leiden c. 1626 - Leiden 1679)

Jan Steen was the eldest son of Leiden grain merchant and brewer Havick Steen (1602-1670) and his wife Elisabet Capiteyn (1606-1669), both Catholic. His baptismal registration has not been preserved. When he enrolled at the Leiden University's faculty of letters in November 1646, he indicated his age as twenty. On 18 March 1648, he joined the newly founded Leiden Guild of St Luke as an independent master.² Before this, according to Weyerman, he was apprenticed to Nicolaus Knüpfer (1603/09-1655) in Utrecht and then to Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685) in Haarlem. In Steen's earliest paintings, the influence of Adriaen’s brother, Isaac van Ostade (1621-1649), is also unmistakable. Houbraken mentioned only Jan van Goyen (1596-1656) as a teacher. Weyerman specified that Steen went to him in order to master a certain way of painting landscapes. Houbraken and Weyerman dated Steen's stay with Van Goyen to around the time of his marriage to Van Goyen’s daughter Margriet (1624-1669), which took place on 3 October 1649.³ In stark contrast to his teachers, Steen is practically unknown as a draughtsman. Only two drawings are universally accepted as autograph; both are preliminary studies for paintings, a double-sided figure study in the Rijksmuseum (inv. no. RP-T-1888-A-1514(R) and RP-T-1888-A-1514(V),⁴ and a compositional study in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (inv. no. WA 1863.282).⁵

Steen continued to live in The Hague until the autumn of 1654. The four paintings by his hand that came up for auction there in the summer of 1651 were sold to the Swedish envoy Harald Appelboom (1612-1674) for the Swedish Field Marshal Gustav Wrangel (1613-1676) and testify to early international interest in his work. Steen's earliest dated paintings – for instance the Tooth-Puller in the Mauritshuis, The Hague (inv. no. 165),⁶ and the Death of Ananias, recently with the Matthiesen Gallery,⁷ – also date from that year, but he may have been painting as early as around 1646. Steen settled in Delft in the autumn of 1654, having signed on 22 July the lease of the brewery 'De Slang', also known as 'De Roskam', which took effect on 1 November for the duration of six years. Barely three years later, he was no longer registered as a brewer, so the venture cannot have been a success. In the spring of 1658, he appears to have settled in Leiden again, but left the city the same year. The artist appears to have settled in neighbouring Warmond. By August 1660, however, he was living in Haarlem, and there he remained for ten years. In 1661, he is listed as a member of the local Guild of St Luke. In 1670, Steen inherited from his father a house in Leiden, where he continued to live permanently. In 1671 he served as headman of the Leiden guild for two years, and in 1674 he was elected dean. Demand for paintings dwindled with the war in the disaster year of 1672, which explains why Steen was forced to open his house as an inn in the summer of that year. On 22 April 1673, Steen, by then a widower, remarried Maria Dircksdr van Egmond (?-1687), the widow of a bookseller. Both were pursued by creditors, but Jan nevertheless continued dutifully to pay his annual dues to the Guild of St Luke. He died in 1679. His last dated painting, the Garden Party of the Paets Family, in a private collection, dates from 1677.⁸ Steen had no pupils except presumably his two sons Thadeus Steen (1651-1691) and Cornelis Steen (1655/56-1697), both of whom became minor painters, although no paintings by them are known.

Eddy Schavemaker, 2023

References
A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, Amsterdam 1718–21, III (1721), pp. 7-8, 12-30; J.C. Weyerman, De levens-beschrijvingen der Nederlandsche konst-schilders en konst-schilderessen, 4 vols., The Hague/Dordrecht 1729–69, II (1729), pp. 346-66; A. Bredius, 'De boeken van het Leidsche St. Lucas gilde', in F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis, 7 vols., Rotterdam 1877-90, V (1882-83), pp. 207, 250; O. Granberg, ‘Schilderijen in 1651 voor Karl Gustav Graf von Wrangel te ’s Gravenhage aangekocht’, Oud Holland 25 (1907), p. 132; U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildendenden Künstler: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, XXXI (1937), pp. 509-15 (text by E. Trautscholdt); B.D. Kirschenbaum, The Religious and Historical Paintings of Jan Steen, Oxford 1977; L. de Vries, Jan Steen, de 'kluchtschilder', Groningen 1977 (PhD diss., Rijksuniversiteit Groningen); K. Braun, Alle tot nu toe bekende schilderijen van Jan Steen, Rotterdam 1980; L. de Vries in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols., London 1996, XXIX, pp. 585-91; M.J. Bok , ‘The Artist’s Life’, in H. Perry Chapman et al, Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1996-97, pp. 25-38; Y. Prins and J. Smit, ‘De naaste verwanten van Jan Steen’, Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 51 (1997), pp. 153-235; E. Buijsen ed.), Haagse schilders in de Gouden Eeuw. Het Hoogsteder Lexicon van alle schilders werkzaam in Den Haag, 1600-1700, Zwolle 1998, pp. 238-42 (text by E. Buijsen), 349; I. van Thiel-Stroman, 'Biographies 15th-17th century', in P. Biesboer et al., Painting in Haarlem, 1500-1850: The Collection of the Frans Hals Museum, coll. cat. Haarlem 2006, pp. 311-13; Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, 94 vols., Munich 1992-, CV (2019), pp. 536-38 (text by W. Kloek)

Entry

The studies on this double-sided sheet are among the few authentic drawings by Jan Steen. In his painted Landscape with Skittle Players in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (inv. no. GG 6319), both motifs appear with only minor changes.⁹ Opinions differ about that painting’s date. A date of circa 1670 was suggested by De Vries (1977), Kloek (1996) and Jansen (2004) because two background figures wear costumes that were in fashion at that date.¹⁰ However, in the opinion of Schatborn, the painting should be assigned on stylistic grounds to the first half of the 1650s,¹¹ a view endorsed on the website of Kunsthistorisches Museum. It is possible that the two figures with later costumes were changed or added only later, especially given Steen’s sometimes unorthodox way of painting and his apparent habit of temporarily leaving paintings incomplete.¹² Schatborn’s earlier proposed dating for the painting, and thus for the Rijksmuseum drawing, is confirmed by the fact that the study on the verso was apparently reused for a painting of circa 1663, Skittle Players outside a Tavern in the National Gallery, London (inv. no. NG 2560).¹³

Both these sketches are typical working material of a painter, not made for the delight of a collector, but in direct preparation for painted figures.¹⁴ For the man smoking a pipe who is seated on the ground in the Vienna painting, Steen posed his model on a low bench. At upper left of the sheet, he explored an alternative version of the figure’s right arm, with a better articulated and more foreshortened forearm. In the Vienna painting, however, he adhered to his full-figure sketch. In the verso study of a skittle player, Steen focussed his attention on the figure’s costume and, in a separate study at right, on the way the white shirt is tucked into the figure’s trousers.

If Jan Steen, like most other seventeenth-century artists, followed this standard working practice, why are there so few of his drawings known today? The only other universally accepted drawing is Moses and the Crown of the Pharaoh in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (inv. no. WA 1863.282),¹⁵ a study – with a large paper correction – for the painting of the subject from circa 1670 in the Mauritshuis, The Hague (inv. no. 1167).¹⁶ Are others still hiding under wrong attributions, did Steen treat his drawings with less care, or were they lost or even destroyed after his death?¹⁷

The inscription with the artist’s name at lower right of the recto seems to be in the same hand as inscriptions on inv. no. RP-T-1900-A-4338, possibly that of the dealer Jan Coenrad Pruyssenaar (1748-1814); see also inv. no. RP-T-1911-69.

Annemarie Stefes, 2019

Literature

J.Q. van Regteren Altena, ‘Hoe tekende Jan Steen?’, Oud Holland 60 (1943), pp. 112-13, 117 (fig. 17); K.G. Boon, Holländische Zeichnungen der Rembrandt-Zeit, ausgewählt aus öffentlichen und privaten Sammlungen in den Niederlanden, exh. cat. Hamburg (Hamburger Kunsthalle) 1961, no. 119, pl. 31; P. Schatborn, Hollandse genre-tekeningen uit de zeventiende eeuw, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet) 1973, no. 96; P. Schatborn and K.G. Boon, Dutch Genre Drawings of the Seventeenth Century: A Loan Exhibition from Dutch Museums, Foundations and Private Collections, exh. cat. New York (Pierpont Morgan Library)/Boston (Museum of Fine Arts)/Chicago (Art Institute of Chicago) 1972-73, no. 96; B. Schnackenburg, Adriaen van Ostade, Isack van Ostade: Zeichnungen und Aquarelle: Gesamtdarstellung mit Werkkatalogen, 2 vols., Hamburg 1981, I, p. 64; P. Schatborn, Dutch Figure Drawings from the Seventeenth Century, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet)/Washington (DC) (National Gallery of Art) 1981-82, pp. 79, 143; H.P. Chapman et al., Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, exh. cat. Washington (DC) (National Gallery of Art)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1996-97, p. 171 (n. 6); J. Walsh, Jan Steen: The Drawing Lesson, Malibu 1996, p. 14 (fig. 9); M. Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century, Zwolle 1997, p. 118 (fig. 54); J. Giltaij (ed.), Senses and Sins: Dutch Painters of Daily Life in the Seventeenth Century, exh. cat. Rotterdam (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen)/Frankfurt-am-Main (Städelsches Kunstinstitut and Städtische Galerie) 2004-05, p. 202 (fig. 1); W.T. Kloek, Jan Steen (1626-1679), Zwolle 2005, pp. 49-50, 60-61; J. Shoaf Turner, ‘Another Secure Preparatory Drawing by Jan Steen’, Master Drawings 47 (2009), no. 4, pp. 433, 436; A. Stefes, Niederländische Zeichnungen, 1450-1800, 3 vols., coll. cat. Hamburg 2011 (Die Sammlungen der Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett, vol. 2), II, p. 530, under no. 1002 (n. 7)

Citation

A. Stefes, 2019, 'Jan Havicksz. Steen, Study of a Man Playing Skittles / Recto: Study of a Seated Man Smoking a Pipe, The Hague, c. 1650 - c. 1655', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200144466

(accessed 12 December 2025 14:40:53).