this, shall have
the hardihood to speak evil of the grape?

Jan is not supposed to have lived at Leyden after his marriage to
Margaretta van Goyen, in 1649, until 1669, when his father died. In
1672 he is known to have taken a tavern at Leyden at the Lange Brug.

Of the intervening years little is known. He was probably at Haarlem
part of the time and at The Hague part of the time, In 1667 he paid
his rent--only twenty-nine florins--with three pictures "painted well
as he was able". Margaretta died in 1669--a merry large woman we must
suppose her from her appearance in Jan's pictures, and the mother of
four or five children who may often be seen in the same scenes. Jan
married again in 1673 and died in 1697.

He was buried in St. Peter's Church, Leyden, leaving more than five
hundred pictures to his name. The youth who, in the absence of the
koster, accompanied me through St. Peter's Church, so far from knowing
where Jan Steen was buried, had never even heard his name. (And at
the Western Church in Amsterdam, where Rembrandt is said to have been
buried, his resting-place cannot be pointed out. But never a Dutch
admiral's grave is in doubt.)

For all his roystering and recklessness, for all his drinking and
excess, Jan Steen's work is essentially delicate. He painted the
sublimated essence of comedy. Teniers, Ostade, Brouwer are coarse and
boorish beside him; Metsu and Mieris genteel. Even when he is painting
low life Jan Steen is distinguished, a gentleman. And now and then
he touches the springs of tears, so exquisite in his sympathetic
understanding. He remains the most lovable painter in Holland, and
the tenderest--in a country where tenderness is not easily found.

Look, for example, at the two pictures at The Hague which are
reproduced opposite pages 74 and 80. The first represents the Steen
family. The jolly Jan himself is smoking at the table; the old brewer
and the elder Mrs. Steen are in the foreground. I doubt if any picture
exists in which the sense of innocent festivity is better expressed. It
is all perhaps rather a muddle: Mrs. Steen has some hard work before
her if the house is to be restored to a Dutch pitch of cleanliness
and order; but how jolly every one is! Jan himself looks just as we
should expect.

The triumph of the "Oyster Feast," on the opposite page, seems to me to
be the girl kneeling in the corner. Here is drawing indeed. The charge
brought by the mysterious painter in Balzac's story