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Inn Scene with Card Players
Jan Havicksz. Steen, c. 1650
- Artwork typedrawing
- Object numberRP-T-1949-66
- Dimensionsheight 239 mm x width 367 mm
- Physical characteristicspen and brown ink, brush and grey ink, over black chalk; later additions in brush and grey and light-brown ink; possibly later additions in pen and dark brown ink; framing line in brown ink (trimmed at left border)
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Identification
Title(s)
Inn Scene with Card Players
Object type
Object number
RP-T-1949-66
Part of catalogue
Creation
Creation
draughtsman: Jan Havicksz. Steen, The Hague (possibly)
Dating
c. 1650
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Material and technique
Physical description
pen and brown ink, brush and grey ink, over black chalk; later additions in brush and grey and light-brown ink; possibly later additions in pen and dark brown ink; framing line in brown ink (trimmed at left border)
Dimensions
height 239 mm x width 367 mm
This work is about
Subject
Acquisition and rights
Acquisition
purchase 1949
Copyright
Provenance
…; Jonkheer Hendrik Teding van Berkhout (1830-1904), Haarlem;{His inscription is on the verso of the sheet.} …; from Dr Nicolaas Beets (1878-1966), Amsterdam, fl. 700, to the museum (L. 2228), 1949
Remarks
Please note that this provenance was formulated with a special focus on provenance research for the years 1933-45 and could therefore be incomplete. There may be more (mostly earlier) provenance information known in the museum. In case this item has an uncertain or incomplete provenance for the years 1933-45, the Rijksmuseum welcomes information and assistance in the investigation and clarification of the provenance of all works during that era.
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Jan Havicksz. Steen
Inn Scene with Card Players
? The Hague, c. 1650
Inscriptions
possibly signed: lower right, in grey-brown ink, JSteen (J and S ligated)
inscribed on verso: upper left, in black ink, by Teding van Berkhout, Jhr Teding-Berkhout.; lower left, in an early eighteenth-century hand, in graphite, Jan Steen; below that, in an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century hand, in pencil, ae/o
stamped on verso: lower centre, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)
Technical notes
Watermark: Foolscap; cf. Laurentius, I, nos. 522 (The Hague: 1649), 528 (Middelburg: 1644) and 549 (The Hague: 1649)
Condition
Vertical fold left of centre; loss in lower left corner
Provenance
…; Jonkheer Hendrik Teding van Berkhout (1830-1904), Haarlem;1His inscription is on the verso of the sheet. …; from Dr Nicolaas Beets (1878-1966), Amsterdam, fl. 700, to the museum (L. 2228), 1949
Object number: RP-T-1949-66
The artist
Biography
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.2A. 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), p. 207; A. Bredius. Jan Steen, Amsterdam 1927, p. 90. 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 1649.3Leiden, Municipal Archives, DTB, Huwelijken voor schepenen, betrothal 19-9-1649, marriage 3-10-1649; A. Bredius. Jan Steen, Amsterdam 1927, p. 90. 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),4P. Schatborn, Hollandse genre-tekeningen uit de zeventiende eeuw, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet) 1973, no. 96. and a compositional study in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (inv. no. WA 1863.282).5J. Shoaf Turner, ‘Another Secure Preparatory Drawing by Jan Steen’, Master Drawings 47 (2009), no. 4, pp. 433-36, fig. 1.
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),6K. Braun, Alle Hitherto Known Paintings by Jan Steen, Rotterdam 1980, p. 20. and the Death of Ananias, recently with the Matthiesen Gallery,7Ibid., p. 91. – 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 1677.8H. Perry Chapman et al, Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1996-97, p. 258. 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.
Jonathan Bikker, 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); RKD artists https://rkd.nl/artists/74809
Entry
Until now, this drawing has been mentioned in print only once, in the museum’s annual report (‘Jaarverslag’) of 1949, when it was described as a ‘nervously sketched study for a well-described but presently unknown painting by Jan Steen’, thus as ‘one of the few authentic drawings by that artist’ (‘[...] een nerveus geschetste voorstudie van een wel beschreven, doch op het ogenblik onbekend schilderij van Jan Steen; als een der weinige zekere bladen van deze tekenaar vult het een leemte’).9Jaarverslag 1949, p. 34 (by D.C. Röell). To this day, no corresponding painting by Steen is known, nor can the composition be matched with any of those described by Hofstede de Groot.10C. Hofstede de Groot (ed.), Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragenden holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, 10 vols., Esslingen 1907-28, I (1907), nos. 1-244. The closest in subject-matter and setting is Steen’s Fight in a Tavern (1664) in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich (inv. no. 276), which also features a prominently-placed ace of spades on the floor.
The lack of a direct connection with a surviving painting is problematic, for the issue of Jan Steen as a draughtsman is notoriously difficult.11This is despite the early efforts of J.Q. van Regteren Altena, ‘Hoe tekende Jan Steen?’, Oud Holland 60 (1943), pp. 97-117. To date, only two sheets are universally accepted as autograph, including the Rijksmuseum’s double-sided drawing with a Study of a Seated Man Smoking a Pipe on the recto and a Study of a Man Playing Skittles on the verso, both of which are related to the artist’s painted Landscape with Skittle Players in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (inv. no. GG 6319). The only other secure attribution is the drawing of Moses and the Crown of the Pharaoh in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (inv. no. WA 1863.282),12J. Shoaf Turner, ‘Another Secure Preparatory Drawing by Jan Steen’, Master Drawings 47 (2009), no. 4, pp. 433-36 (fig. 1). a study – with a large paper correction – for the painting of the subject from c. 1670 in the Mauritshuis, The Hague (inv. no. 1167).13Ibid., fig. 2 (erroneously as still in the private collection of the Wetzlar famly).
There are nevertheless strong arguments in favour of endorsing the traditional attribution of the present drawing to Jan Steen. Its style, subject-matter and composition are reminiscent of drawings by Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685), with whom Steen may have been apprenticed before he became a master painter in Leiden in 1648. An early date shortly after such training is further supported by the paper’s watermark, of which there are examples on dated works from the late 1640s. Third, the drawing’s interior tavern setting is closely related to the one depicted in several of Steen’s paintings, among them the Lean Kitchen (c. 1650) in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (inv. no. 9014).14H.P. Chapman et al., Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, exh. cat. Washington (DC) (National Gallery of Art)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1996-97, no. 3 (ill.).
Both works show a beamed ceiling with a suspended bird cage15This would become a recurring motif in Steen’s later works; cf. ibid., p. 107. and, to the right, an imposing hearth with rounded hood and a doorway beyond. Most importantly, the drawing features motifs and figures whose body and facial types, especially their caricature expressions and ‘pin-dot’ eyes, correspond to the stylistic and iconographical elements of Steen’s authentic works. For instance, the two tall, slender men on the right of the drawing could be the visual cousins of the lean kitchen’s inhabitants. The round face of the child at lower centre of the drawing, offering the remains of his meal to a cat, would well fit in Steen’s painted Fat Kitchen,16Ibid., no. 2 (ill.). the counterpart in a private collection to the Ottawa Lean Kitchen, which includes a comparable motif at lower left of a haggard boy feeding pap to his dog. The standing card-player at left centre of the drawing, a typical Steen narrator, eyeing the viewer and gesticulating towards the game of cards, is wearing a type of old-fashioned headgear that is found in both paintings.
There are admittedly certain awkward passages, such as the lack of volume in the woman tapping a beer keg at lower left or the bumpy contours of her right arm, which might be signs of youthful inexperience. Perhaps the strikingly stippled contours (found in the seated card player to the right and the back of the cat) are potential hallmarks of an early manner. However, both features could also indicate the hand of a copyist. Yet the presence of pentimenti in the head, shoulder and right arm of the second man to the right and in the stairs showing through the timber wall speak against such a conclusion. Moreover, the somewhat hasty and spontaneous draughtsmanship seems to mirror what has been described as Steen’s characteristic handling as a painter.17W.T. Kloek, Jan Steen (1626-1679), Zwolle 2005, pp. 42, 51, 53.
At some later date, the drawing was retouched with grey and light-brown wash, as can best be seen in the blank spots within the old vertical fold, where this added wash was not absorbed into the paper. This later hand was apparently also responsible for the rather flat modelling of the standing card player and the figures behind him, as well as for the brown triangular shape between the standing men to the right, compromising their spatial relationship. Even some parts of the pen-and-brown ink contours (its darker accents bleeding through at the verso), as well as the ‘signature’ JSteen, might be later additions. Unlike the old inscription in graphite with the artist’s name on the verso (with the ‘e’s with breve-like loops at the top), the recto ‘signature’ uses modern ‘e’s.
Annemarie Stefes, 2019
Citation
A. Stefes, 2019, 'Jan Havicksz. Steen, Inn Scene with Card Players, The Hague, c. 1650', in J. Turner (ed.), (under construction) Drawings 2, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200144545
(accessed 6 December 2025 15:38:28).Footnotes
- 1His inscription is on the verso of the sheet.
- 2A. 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), p. 207; A. Bredius. Jan Steen, Amsterdam 1927, p. 90.
- 3Leiden, Municipal Archives, DTB, Huwelijken voor schepenen, betrothal 19-9-1649, marriage 3-10-1649; A. Bredius. Jan Steen, Amsterdam 1927, p. 90.
- 4P. Schatborn, Hollandse genre-tekeningen uit de zeventiende eeuw, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet) 1973, no. 96.
- 5J. Shoaf Turner, ‘Another Secure Preparatory Drawing by Jan Steen’, Master Drawings 47 (2009), no. 4, pp. 433-36, fig. 1.
- 6K. Braun, Alle Hitherto Known Paintings by Jan Steen, Rotterdam 1980, p. 20.
- 7Ibid., p. 91.
- 8H. Perry Chapman et al, Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1996-97, p. 258.
- 9Jaarverslag 1949, p. 34 (by D.C. Röell).
- 10C. Hofstede de Groot (ed.), Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragenden holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, 10 vols., Esslingen 1907-28, I (1907), nos. 1-244.
- 11This is despite the early efforts of J.Q. van Regteren Altena, ‘Hoe tekende Jan Steen?’, Oud Holland 60 (1943), pp. 97-117.
- 12J. Shoaf Turner, ‘Another Secure Preparatory Drawing by Jan Steen’, Master Drawings 47 (2009), no. 4, pp. 433-36 (fig. 1).
- 13Ibid., fig. 2 (erroneously as still in the private collection of the Wetzlar famly).
- 14H.P. Chapman et al., Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, exh. cat. Washington (DC) (National Gallery of Art)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1996-97, no. 3 (ill.).
- 15This would become a recurring motif in Steen’s later works; cf. ibid., p. 107.
- 16Ibid., no. 2 (ill.).
- 17W.T. Kloek, Jan Steen (1626-1679), Zwolle 2005, pp. 42, 51, 53.