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In many countries around the world today, children celebrate the Feast of St. Nicholas. Children in the Netherlands set their shoes out the night before, on December 5, and wake up on December 6 to shoes filled with toys and goodies. “The Feast of St. Nicholas” by Jan Steen, a 17th century Dutch painter, depicts the morning of St. Nicholas’ feast in a traditional Dutch household.
1. “The Feast of St. Nicholas” is only one of at least six scenes that Jan Steen painted of St. Nicholas’ feast day. This one is almost 3 feet high and just over 2 feet wide.
2. Steen was born into a strong Catholic family that ran a tavern, The Red Halbert. When Steen was about 28, he ran his own brewery, De Roscam (The Curry Comb), but with little success.
3. After moving into the household of landscape painter Jan van Goyen, Steen married van Goyen’s daughter, Margriet. The two had 8 children together. Steen later had a ninth child with a second wife, Maria van Egmont, after Margriet died.
4. Steen was quite prolific, creating approximately 800 paintings during his lifetime. Roughly 350 of those paintings survive today.
5. Unlike some artists, Steen was reasonably well-paid and his work was valued by his contemporaries, yet he never had any official students.
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Comments (9)
Comment
nice…one of my favorite features on the m_f blog…in looking at the painting, I can’t help but ask - do the Feast of St Nicholas day festivities in the Netherlands traditionally include booger-picking? Looks like the guy to the left in the painting is digging up a winner
:)
posted by Clotho on 12-6-2007 at 3:33 pm
Love this series. Don’t know much about art but I work with someone with that name. Why is the boy crying? Did he get a lump of coal in his shoe. Why is his sister laughing at him?
posted by mike on 12-6-2007 at 3:35 pm
That’s a neat effect in the background with the reflection in the mirror (?) on the wall. Is that a hallmark of Dutch painting of this period? I remember a background mirror was a key feature in my art history class’s analysis of ‘The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait’ (Jan van Eyck, I think?).
posted by Roger on 12-6-2007 at 3:49 pm
mike: My research mentioned that one of the children received coal and/or a cane; I’m assuming it was the crying one.
Roger: I’m not sure if mirror reflections were a hallmark of Dutch painting, but I do know that several sources commented on Jan Steen’s ability to balance the painting with someone leaning to the left when someone else is leaning to the right, etc. I would assume that the mirror reflection is part of the attempt to balance the painting and draw the whole room together.
posted by Andréa on 12-6-2007 at 5:11 pm
The boy at left is not digging for a booger, but, as Mike pointed out, crying, because he received a rod in his shoe. Naughty children receive lumps of coal or birch-rods, good children get toys and candy. The father is pointing up the chimney, down which Saint Nicholas is wont to climb to deliver the goodies (or rods), as does “Santa Claus”, who is based on this much older tradition.
It’s amazing how little has changed over the centuries, all the basic elements are still there today (except for the rods and coal, nowadays, all children are presumed to have been good).
posted by Tsitsi on 12-6-2007 at 5:13 pm
OK, I cant see her ace that well but the little girl in front looks VERY creepy to me… When you look at her very quickly she kinda looks like a tiny demon with a smirk… Maybe she should have gotten the rod…
posted by GTT on 12-6-2007 at 5:49 pm
Roger:
The mirror/reflections is certainly a Dutch tradition. This was first seen in work by Jan van Eyck, specifically in the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait (the artist can be seen in the mirror behind the couple).
Van Eyck was one of the first widely recognized Dutch artists, and so his reflection work became a convention of Northern Style painters.
posted by jzimm on 12-6-2007 at 9:00 pm
In Jan Steen’s time gifts (including sweets) were placed in shoes. Given that this was a long time before the invention of cellophane, one cannot think that it was terribly hygienic!
There is a large version of the picture accessible via the Netherlands edition of the Wikipedia, that can be accessed via the entry on Sinterklaas. [Links not permitted, so you will have to find it yourself] The additional detail allows one to see that the crying boy received twigs in his shoe.
The pointing child has received a golf club, which is quite interesting. Around the time of the painting the Dutch were in fact exporting golf balls to Scotland.
The granny in the background appears to be beckoning to the crying lad, perhaps to give him a consolation gift now that his lesson has been learned.
It has been suggested that the painting may have been a personal response by Jan Steen to the banning of the St Nicholas festivities by the Protestant authorities in 1657. Christmas had already been banned a decade earlier in England. And Boston followed in 1659.
(Even today there are Christians who decline to participate in Christmas or Sint-Nicolaas festivities, for much the same reasons as those given back then. But they do not interfere with anybody else’s fun.)
posted by Andrew J. Winks on 12-7-2007 at 4:54 am
The crying child looks like a man to me, a short man.
posted by leah on 12-7-2007 at 1:50 pm