Farcical Jan, Pier the Droll: Steen and the Memory of Bruegel

Abstract

Seventeenth-century memories of Pieter Bruegel the Elder fundamentally informed Jan Steen’s paintings and the earliest writings about his life and work. In 1721, Arnold Houbraken characterised Steen in the comic terms Karel van Mander had introduced for “Peasant Bruegel” or “Pier the Droll”. Houbraken’s borrowings of this vocabulary register his understanding of “Farcical Jan” as Bruegel redivivus. Steen’s early peasant themes partly prompted this identification. Most of Steen’s works do not represent peasants, however, but middle-class characters in urban settings. They resemble the cast of Dutch comic literature and theatre. To evoke Steen’s non-peasant production, Houbraken wrote his biography in farcical mode.

Steen’s paintings mandated Houbraken’s presentation of him as a transformed Bruegel, for Steen reconstituted the peasant mode in a comic art relevant to his urban audience. With his first peasant works he consciously inserted himself in the tradition of Bruegel, whose memory had been kept present through prints and through the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Younger. In the mid-1650s, Steen began to represent an urban milieu, but with the pictorial means of Bruegel’s peasant paintings. As Houbraken recognised, Steen’s application of these means to middle class themes updated Bruegel’s moral efficacy for his urban viewers.