Tweeërlei spel, by Jan Havicksz. Steen, (1660 - 1679).
In the lively cities of the 17th-century Dutch Republic, no artist captured the spirited chaos of everyday life quite like Jan Steen. Born in Leiden in 1626 into a Catholic brewing family, Steen grew up amid taverns, markets, and domestic bustle—scenes that would later fill his paintings with warmth, wit, and mischief. Though briefly a university student, he chose instead to paint the human comedy in all its unruly brilliance.
Trained by prominent artists (possibly including Adriaen van Ostade or Nicolaus Knupfer), Steen developed a rich, theatrical style full of color, detail, and narrative flair. In the early 1670s, during financial hardship, he ran a tavern in Leiden—a life experience that clearly informed the authenticity and irony of his scenes.
Steen’s paintings overflow with humor and disorder. His interiors are cluttered with overturned mugs, sleeping dogs, flirtation, and chaos—but beneath the merriment lies a moral undertone. Like many Dutch genre painters, he used satire to comment on vice, vanity, and indulgence.
A striking example is “Tweeërlei spel” (Twofold Game, ca. 1660–1679), a tavern scene built around two kinds of “play”: a group of men focused on triktrak (backgammon), and an older man groping a serving woman in the foreground. All around are symbols of disorder—broken eggshells, the pipe and coals, mussel shells (signs of lust), a fallen stool, and a dog lying amid the chaos. A lute hangs overhead, evoking fleeting pleasure.
Here, Steen blends comedy with critique. The “game” is both literal and suggestive, drawing attention to power, gender, and temptation. Having run a tavern himself, Steen may well have painted from life—or at least from keen observation.
In a society that prized Calvinist restraint and bourgeois order, Jan Steen gave us something else: a mirror of the untidy, unguarded moments that reveal our shared humanity. When he died in 1679, he left behind a body of work that still speaks to the absurdity and beauty of everyday life. Through paintings like Twofold Game, Steen reminds us that even in chaos, there is laughter—and in folly, a truth.