2026 Theses Doctoral

Child’s Play in Jan Steen’s Comic Paintings

Gobel, Katherine H.

This dissertation offers the first sustained art historical study of childhood in the work of Jan Steen (1626–79), examining how his child-centered pictures participated in some of the most vigorously contested cultural debates of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

Approaching Dutch genre paintings as active participants in ongoing social discourses rather than passive reflections of unified cultural ideals, this study asks not only what these images depict but how they mean: through what comic conventions, visual strategies, and inherited pictorial languages they negotiate and at moments expose the values of upbringing and domestic order they appear to uphold.

To this end, the dissertation brings into sustained dialogue with Steen’s pictures a wide range of contextual material—childrearing treatises, pedagogical manuals, medical texts, theology, and comic writing—that together reveal childhood as a deeply contested field in which reformist, nostalgic, and heterodox positions were simultaneously in play. In a society where childhood had become a cultural battleground, Steen did not illustrate those battles but rather entered them.

The opening chapter examines Steen’s depictions of family merriment, focusing on his creative misappropriation of the language of family portraiture. Through his multiple variations on the proverb “As the old sing, so pipe the young”—in which his own recognizable household is transplanted into scenes of comic misrule—Steen exploited the porousness between genre and portraiture to probe contemporary debates about the transmission of behavior across generations and the role of parental example in shaping children’s character, questions made urgent by Calvinist doctrines of total depravity and their implications for familial responsibility.

The second chapter turns to Steen’s representations of childrearing in the domestic interior. Juxtaposing his carnivalesque households with the ordered interiors of Pieter de Hooch and Gerrit Dou, the chapter demonstrates how Steen mobilized children as key agents of misrule who expose the fragility of the bourgeois household as a supposedly safe, regulated space—and how resistant children’s bodies and wandering attention become vehicles for an irreverent commentary on the over-zealous aspirations of domestic reform.

The third chapter examines Steen’s scenes of children’s play and holiday festivity. Situating these works within Haarlem’s distinctive comic culture and tracing his engagement with Bruegelian and Jordaensian festive imagery, the chapter argues that his holiday pictures celebrate older forms of sociability at precisely the moment those forms were coming under the most intense Reformist pressure, offering viewers a space of communal, non-threatening laughter that neither repudiates nor fully endorses the new priorities.
The fourth and final chapter investigates Steen’s schoolroom paintings and scenes of artistic instruction, reading them against a rich pictorial inheritance and against educational literature from Erasmus to Comenius. What emerges is a comic vision of education as an inherently unstable process, one in which the gap between pedagogical ideals and the unruly bodies and wandering minds of children is not explicitly a failure to be corrected but a condition to be accepted.
The conclusion turns to Steen’s history paintings, in which the same investment in childhood surfaces with equal persistence, suggesting that the representation of the child in his work opens onto new ways of thinking about the pictorial possibilities of this most ideologically charged of subjects.