Jan Steen's wife could not be seen in the portrait, but in reality, she was gravely ill. To pay for her treatment, Steen owed an apothecary a considerable sum. One day in 1670, the apothecary burst into Steen's home, searched out all his paintings, and auctioned them off to settle the debt. That very private painting of his wife was circulated in this way.
She was a painter's daughter, and that painter happened to be Steen's teacher. She had nothing but her face, her figure, and a happy family.
For a time, Steen's works were full of sunlight and humor: pigeons flying through the air from a distant street, a girl teaching a kitten to dance, people taking indoor music lessons, and dentists, patients, and spectators. But later, he lost heart and stopped painting. Originally the son of a brewer, he eventually returned to the family trade, often drowning his sorrows in drink. He died at fifty-three, leaving behind more than four hundred unsold paintings, all of which together were worth less than Vermeer's later priceless treasure, "Girl with a Pearl Earring."
The greatest feature of his paintings was their chaos, yet there was harmony within that chaos. More importantly, his paintings were cheap, and many households in his era owned them. Although Tulip Mania and the later Anglo-Dutch Wars had left the Dutch far worse off than during their Golden Age, they still placed a bouquet of flowers in their homes or hung up a painting to add some color to their dim rooms.
This attitude toward life created demand for flowers and paintings, allowing the Netherlands' flower industry to flourish. Just as some people believed buying flowers was useless and that the money would be better spent on practical things, it was simply a matter of each person's