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Artist or Maker: Jan Steen (Leiden 1626-1679)
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Provenance: with Colnaghi, London 1892.
with L. Lesser, London 1906.
Heilbuth, Copenhagen, 1917.
Herman Rasch, Stockholm, 1924.
with Pieter de Boer, by 1937, from whom purchased by Jacob Hartog, The Hague;
Confiscated by the Nazi authorities after May 1940.
Acquired for the 'Sonderauftrag Linz', 18 August 1942 (100,000 florins);
Returned to the Stichting Netherlands Kunstbezit, The Netherlands, 20 August 1945.
Restituted to Jacob Hartog, and by descent to present owners.
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Exhibited: Amsterdam, 1907,
Copenhagen, 1920.
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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF THE LATE HAROLD A. HARTOG SOLD TO BENEFIT THE HAROLD A. AND INGEBORG L. HARTOG FOUNDATION (lots 21 and 57)
Jan Steen was born in Leiden in 1626 to an upper middle class Catholic family. He was the oldest son of a brewer and grain merchant and, on 18 March 1648, was registered as a master-painter in the Guild of Saint Luke. No records of his apprenticeship and training exist, but both of Steen's eighteenth century biographers, Arnold Houbraken and Jacob Campo Weyerman, place him in the workshop of landscape painter Jan van Goyen (1596-1656). A document of 13 October 1649 records Steen's marriage to Van Goyen's daughter, Margriet, in The Hague and the couple appear to have remained there until 1654, when Steen is recorded on a number of occasions in Leiden. During the same year, Steen leased a brewery in partnership with his father in Delft. The explosion of Delft's powder magazine in 1654 and a steady decline in the city's brewing industry led to financial difficulties for the artist and in 1657 he took up temporary residence in Leiden. From 1658, Steen and his family lived in Warmond, a village north of Leiden, and by 1660 had moved to Haarlem. Margriet died in Haarlem in 1669 and the artist was left to care for their six children. Steen moved his family back to Leiden in 1670 and there he served for the next two years as headman and, in 1674, was elected dean. Steen remarried in 1673 and, according to Houbraken and Weyerman, spent most of the rest of his life smoking and drinking with his artist friends, Lievens, De Vois, and Van Mieris. He died in Leiden in 1679 at the age of 53.
The present painting has traditionally been called The Cockfight , but it was not until it was with de Boer in 1937-8, that it is first recorded as The Poutry-Seller . Several times around 1660, he painted tradespeople, such as The fish-seller (private collection), The Pancake Woman (Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester) and the present painting, that all have a strong resemblance to Gabriel Metsu.
His portrayal of birds, which he would have learnt from Isack van Ostade, in the present painting is much the same as in The Poultry Yard (Mauritshuis, The Hague) where he also made similar use of a view through a gateway. Likewise in his Cock-Fight of 1637-8, currently in a private collection (Kloek, op. cit ., p. 136, fig. 3) he employs the poultry to mirror the behaviour of the central protagonists.
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