Jan Steen’s Leiden: the Painter of Beautiful Chaos

In Dutch, a house in chaos is a Jan Steen household — een huishouden van Jan Steen. The phrase is named after a Leiden painter born around 1626, and the joke cuts both ways: he painted chaos because he lived in it.

He was born into a brewers’ family — well-to-do, Catholic, Leiden. The family had run a tavern called The Red Halbert for two generations, which is as good a classroom as any for a future painter of parties. Born around 1626, the eldest of eight or more children: he grew up inside the noise he would later sell.

In 1648, aged about twenty-two, Steen and the painter Gabriël Metsu founded the Guild of Saint Luke at Leiden — the city’s painters’ guild, started by two men in their twenties who decided their town deserved one. Rembrandt had left for Amsterdam years before. The next generation stayed and made it official.

The life ran on two fuels: paint and beer. He married Margriet, daughter of the landscape painter Jan van Goyen, on 3 October 1649 — in Leiden, the one anniversary date nobody forgets, since the whole city throws the party anyway. He leased a brewery in Delft, De Slang, “The Snake”, and ran it for three years without much success. His most productive years came in Warmond and Haarlem. In 1670, after his wife and his father died, he moved back to Leiden for good. When the art market collapsed in the disaster year 1672, he did the sensible thing for a Steen: he opened a tavern. He led the painters’ guild in 1674. He died in 1679 and was buried in a family grave in the Pieterskerk.

The paintings: roughly eight hundred produced, about three hundred and fifty survive. The households in them are loud. Children, dogs, wine, a grandmother stealing the sweets while nobody looks — his Feast of Saint Nicholas in the Rijksmuseum is a family Christmas with the lid off. In As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young, the Mauritshuis version, the adults sing and the children pipe, and the moral sits in the corner like an unpaid bill. He used his own family as models. The chaos looks autobiographical. It is also staged: Steen knew the theatre — the chambers of rhetoric, Leiden’s amateur drama clubs — and built his scenes like stage sets, with the lesson hidden in the wings.

Where to see him now: the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam hangs him, and so does the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Stand in front of one painting and wait a moment. It is loud. A dozen people at a party, all mid-sentence, and the painter somewhere in the middle of them, grinning at you specifically.

The walk pauses where his Leiden stood — stop 11. What the tavern sold, who drank there, and what the neighbours wrote about it afterwards: that stays in the book, where a story like his belongs. Chaos keeps better in print.