In this quiet domestic scene, Jan Steen visualized the mundane duties of childcare in a moment of collaborative parenting.1 A father, with his oversized cap set askew, squints his eyes, bares his teeth in a grin, and prepares to cover or clothe his bare-bottomed child, while the mother, in an elegant blue jacket, patiently assists by holding the child up in her arms. Their home is simple but well kept, indicative of the family’s comfortable middle-class status. An earthenware porridge pot on the table, covered with a tablecloth, suggests that the child has just been fed. On the walls hang several household objects: a pair of bellows for a fire, new candles, a slotted spoon, and, in a niche, an oil lamp and a corked bottle. The child, whose arms are wrapped around the mother’s neck, gazes back toward the father with a slight smile.
Familial scenes, particularly those prominently featuring child-life imagery, were among Steen’s favorite subjects; he made many pictures of holiday celebrations and children playing, as well as visualizations of the Dutch proverb “As the old sing, so pipe the young,” a humorous lesson about the inevitability of passing learned traits from generation to generation.2 For Steen, themes of childrearing and children’s social lives were often ripe for situational comedy, particularly from 1660 to 1670 during his tenure in Haarlem, where artists such as Adriaen van Ostade (1610–84), Dirck Hals (1591–1656), Jan Miense Molenaer (1610–68), and Judith Leyster (1609–60) were similarly interested in humorous childhood scenes.
Steen’s relatively rough handling of paint in the execution of this picture—evident, for instance, in the visible brushstrokes on the child’s sleeve—supports the painting’s dating to his Haarlem period and indicates the influence of Haarlem artists. While Steen was known to vary his choice of rough or fine brushstrokes for different subjects throughout his career, the more expressive style seen here is typical of these years, during which he also executed his most inventive family-related pictures.
The question of Steen’s comic intentions in this charming picture, however, remains open. The scene does not, for instance, deploy the type of crude, scatological comedy found in Adriaen Brouwer’s (1605–38) Dresden painting (fig 1) of a peasant father wiping his child’s exposed bottom. Put off by the stench, the father turns his head away, scrunches his nose and eyes, and purses his lips. Brouwer’s vivid picture is probably an allegorical depiction of Smell from a now-lost series of the Five Senses.3 The motif of diaper changing, most often featuring mothers, can also be found in some indecorous comic genre pictures as well as in an emblem in Johan de Brune’s (1588–1658) Emblemata en Zinnewercke (1624) (fig 2), illustrated by Adriaen van de Venne (1589–1662), with the caption, “This life, what is it, but stink and dung?”4 Decades later, the classicist Gerard de Lairesse (1641–1711) denounced the inclusion of similar offensive subject matter in genre pictures, explicitly naming offenders like Brouwer and Molenaer and calling out imagery he deemed unsuitable for paintings, such as “nasty children sitting in a potty chair.”5
Steen’s Family in an Interior, by contrast, does not seem to represent the unpleasant smells of baby cleaning but instead represents more sanitized aspects of childcare. It is unclear whether the rich blue cloth held by the father is a form of swaddling or a blanket or an item of clothing; yet, as a depiction of a mother and father performing the daily tasks of feeding, cleaning, clothing, or warming their child, the painting may be considered an exemplary image of dutiful parenting, a model to be followed. Indeed, the subject matter of familial harmony is not unlike Steen’s several depictions of pious families praying before a meal, such as the example in The Leiden Collection.
In his particular focus on the father’s role, Steen was likely also influenced by Van Ostade’s depictions of humble peasant families, such as his engraving from 1648 (fig 3) of a smiling father seated by a fireplace, spoon-feeding a baby while the mother dries the laundry.6 By reimagining Van Ostade’s example in a painting like this one, Steen updated the imagery of the pater familias type from the peasant setting to a well-kept interior, an adaptation befitting later seventeenth-century tastes for more refined domestic spaces.7 Steen featured spoon-feeding in other genre pictures, too, including his painting in Dresden (fig 4) of a mother attempting to feed a baby from a pot that resembles the one in the present work.8 For contemporary audiences of parents, one may well imagine the appeal of a relatable scene of childcare in a tidy domestic setting like that of Family in an Interior.9
On the other hand, Steen’s iconographic choices in this picture might simultaneously be read as comic.10 The father, with his less-than-elegant facial features and toothy grin, wears a hat that could be interpreted as a kraamheerenmut, a celebratory new father’s cap, similar to the one depicted in Steen’s Celebrating the Birth (fig 5) in the Wallace Collection.11 In that picture, the man behind the “new father” with the hat makes a two-finger “V” gesture, revealing him to be a cuckold.12 In Family in an Interior, elements including the unused pair of bellows and unlit candles and oil lamp may likewise suggest sexual ineptitude or lack of romance.13 Yet, the quietude and general propriety of the scene make this interpretation hardly conclusive. Steen perhaps left the moral implications of the picture intentionally ambiguous, allowing the scene, with its comic clues, to pose an unanswered question. As with many of his pictures, Steen has dropped the viewer into the middle of the action, allowing his narrative to hang in the balance.
Steen further demonstrated his ability to humorize the subject of early parenting in another painting—which is now sadly lost and known only through copies such as one sold at Sotheby’s in 2020 (fig 6)—of three children attempting to feed and clothe or swaddle a cat, playacting the activities of adults.14 In the scene, a girl, acting as mother, restrains a bonnet-wearing cat and tries to feed it with a spoon while two boys, pseudo-fathers, prepare to wrap the cat in a blue cloth, just like the father in Family in an Interior. Steen’s inventive adaptations of childcare thus extend to multiple comic strategies and interpretive possibilities. His focus on the world of children offered ample opportunities to convey intricate family dynamics, the trials of parenting, and the propensities and emotions of children.