Streit beim Kartenspiel

Dated 1664/65 on the museum’s record and catalogued in Berlin as inventory 795B, the canvas entered the collection in 1874 with the museum’s purchase of the cabinet of the Aachen banker Barthold Suermondt — one of the acquisitions that stocked the Gemäldegalerie when it opened on the Museumsinsel. The museum’s title means “quarrel at the game of cards”. Jan Steen was born in Leiden in 1625 or 1626 and died there in 1679. He trained under Jan van Goyen, whose daughter he married, and worked in The Hague, Delft — where he is recorded running a brewery — Haarlem and Leiden again, keeping an inn in his birthplace in the 1670s. The households and taverns he painted, cast with the faces of his own family, are the images through which the Dutch Republic’s domestic comedy is still read. The painting is held in the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.