The Merry Family

Jan Steen, the Dutch Golden Age’s great comic moralist, painted The Merry Family in 1668 as a cautionary scene of a household given over to drinking and song. Steen’s own family served as models, and the motto inscribed on the wall — a warning that idle parents raise wayward children — turned the rollicking interior into one of the era’s most quoted examples of a ‘Steen household.’