The Merry Family

The rollicking interior given over to drink and song is the painter’s great cautionary scene of a household undone by idle parenting — the very model of what came to be known as a ‘Steen household.’ Jan Steen painted The Merry Family in 1668, drawing on members of his own family as his models, and gave force to the correction by inscribing on the wall the warning that idle parents raise wayward children. Intimacy with the subject lent the comedy its sting, and the picture has remained among the most quoted moralizing genre scenes of the Dutch Golden Age.