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拍品专文
Christ in the House of Mary and Martha was painted at the height of Jan Steen’s career in the mid- to late 1660s, by which time he had a highly sophisticated grasp of composition. Rather than the usual drunken revellers carousing in crowded taverns, this painting represents one of the somewhat rarer occasions upon which Steen turned his hand to Biblical narrative. Red curtains are lifted back to reveal the scene, a device used by the artist in several other Biblical paintings, for example Esther before Ahasuerus at the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg (inv. no. 878), painted at around the same time as the present work. The curtains are also emblematic of Steen’s longstanding affiliation with theatre, which became so integral to his aesthetic.
As recounted in the Gospel of Luke (10:38-42), Christ visited the house of two sisters, Mary and Martha. Mary chose to listen to His teachings rather than help her sister prepare food, and she sits at Christ’s feet at the centre of the composition, her head bowed in reverence. Martha, laden with a platter of bread and bucket of water, appeals to Christ for Mary to help her but He responds that Mary has made the right choice: the Word of God, over material sustenance.
Notwithstanding its didactic message, the present painting is not altogether devoid of those light-hearted elements of contemporary life at which Steen excelled; the scene conveys the legacy of Pieter Aertsen and his nephew Joachim Beuckelaer from the previous century. Both painters distinguished themselves by setting Biblical narratives within Dutch and Flemish domestic interiors, incorporating detailed and elaborate displays of still life. Here, an unusually rich and varied array of fruit, vegetables, fish and kitchen utensils is carefully arranged in the immediate foreground, a lute hangs on the rear wall, and at lower left a young boy fills a jug of water from a fountain, looking mischievously beyond the scene. These quotidian elements serve to enliven Steen’s historical and Biblical scenes, which might otherwise seem staid in comparison to his customarily boisterous depictions of everyday life.
As has been posited in the past (Martin, Kirschenbaum & Braun, op. cit.), Wouter Kloek also suggests that some of the fruit and vegetables were completed by another hand. We are grateful to him for inspecting the work first-hand and for proposing a date in the second half of the 1660s.
As recounted in the Gospel of Luke (10:38-42), Christ visited the house of two sisters, Mary and Martha. Mary chose to listen to His teachings rather than help her sister prepare food, and she sits at Christ’s feet at the centre of the composition, her head bowed in reverence. Martha, laden with a platter of bread and bucket of water, appeals to Christ for Mary to help her but He responds that Mary has made the right choice: the Word of God, over material sustenance.
Notwithstanding its didactic message, the present painting is not altogether devoid of those light-hearted elements of contemporary life at which Steen excelled; the scene conveys the legacy of Pieter Aertsen and his nephew Joachim Beuckelaer from the previous century. Both painters distinguished themselves by setting Biblical narratives within Dutch and Flemish domestic interiors, incorporating detailed and elaborate displays of still life. Here, an unusually rich and varied array of fruit, vegetables, fish and kitchen utensils is carefully arranged in the immediate foreground, a lute hangs on the rear wall, and at lower left a young boy fills a jug of water from a fountain, looking mischievously beyond the scene. These quotidian elements serve to enliven Steen’s historical and Biblical scenes, which might otherwise seem staid in comparison to his customarily boisterous depictions of everyday life.
As has been posited in the past (Martin, Kirschenbaum & Braun, op. cit.), Wouter Kloek also suggests that some of the fruit and vegetables were completed by another hand. We are grateful to him for inspecting the work first-hand and for proposing a date in the second half of the 1660s.