Jan Steen   
(1626-1679)
Genre painting, represented all levels of society engaged in almost every conceivable activity.
Jan Steen, is one who stands out as a Genre Artist, with energy and good humor. 

It was Jan Steen's mission to paint human life in a spirit of toleration, emphasized by keen satire.  His father was a brewer in Leyden, where Jan was born in 1626.
When he was eighteen he went to Haarlem, where he studied under Jan van Goyen and then married his daughter.

There isn't any question about Jan Steen's greatness as a painter nor his versatility.  He painted chemists in the laboratories, doctors at the bedside of their patients, card parties, marriage feasts, even religious subjects. He had a special gift for painting children.  While his work is full of humor, it is all characterized by a remarkable intelllectual quality.  He appears to have been very industrious; for nearly nine hundred of his works have been listed in catalogues.

At forty-one years, he went into the brewery business at Delft; but failed, and his pictures were seized and sold because of a debt of four dollars he owed to an apothecary.  He returned to Leyden and opened a tavern. He died at Leyden at the age of fifty three.