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Dimensions: measurements note 40.7 by 32.2 cm.; 46 by 12 3/4 in.
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Provenance: Gustaf Adolf sparre (1746-1794);
Sparre inv., 1794, no. 11.
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Exhibited: Stockholm, 1884, no. 177;
Stockholm, 1967, no. 151 (p. 102 in the catalogue);
Kristianstad, 1977, no. 34.
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Literature: Granberg, 1885-6, no. 51;
Göthe, 1895, p. 35, no. 58;
C. Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné..., vol. I, London 1907, p. 216, no. 798;
Granberg, 1911-12, no. 423;
Kjellberg, 1966, p. 346;
Hasselgren, 1974, pp. 113, 120, reproduced p. 188;
K. Braun, Alle tot nu toe bekende schilderijen van Jan Steen, Glarus/Rotterdam 1980, p. 100, no. 112, reproduced p. 101 (as whereabouts unknown; formerly in the Wachtmeister collection).
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Notes: Braun dates this picture circa 1659-1661, that is to say to just before or just after Jan Steen's move from Warmond, near Leiden, to Haarlem. Around this date Steen painted a number of interiors such as this one with two principal figures, as his contemporaries such as Frans van Mieris and Gerard Ter Borch were doing at the same time.
The influence of the Leiden fijnschilders on Steen's work becomes more marked from 1658 onwards, following his move from Deflt to Leiden. During this period Steen started to treat the same subjects as the fijnschilders, such as The Doctor's Visit, and he will have been aware of Frans van Mieris' comic treatments of erotic themes in inns or more plausibly brothels, such as his celebrated picture of 1658 in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, in which copulating dogs and bedding hanging over a baluster tell the viewer where the social encounter in the foreground is leading.υ1 The Sparre picture is on a panel of very similar size. In it, Steen shows us a lecherous man proferring a clay pipe in a suggestive gesture to a young woman who is clearly the worse for drink, as her empty wineglass indicates. A bed in the background tells us where this encounter too going to end up.
Apart from their very different handling of paint, the key difference between such pictures by Steen and those of Van Mieris, Ter Borch et al, is not in the comedy of the situation, but in Steen's caricatural figures. Here, as in nearly all his work, Steen is more theatrical than any of his leading contemporaries, and he gives us the impression that his figures are acting comic parts for our entertainmant, and are not unaware participants, observed by the artist as if caught on camera.
There can be no doubt that Steen must have seen pictures like this in collections in The Hague and Rotterdam during his first visit to The Netherlands in 1768. It is likely however that Sparre bought it later, in Paris in 1780, since it has the same design of frame as other pictures he bought at that time.
1. Oil on panel, 42.8 by 33.3 cm.; see O. Naumann, Frans van Mieris the Elder, Doornspijk 1981, vol. 2, pp. 26-7, reproduced plate 23.
