Appearances deceive
‘The landlord of the Three Masts is sooner drunk than his guests’ is a saying that does not, at first, seem appropriate to one of Holland’s most famous painters. But appearances are deceptive. This proverb was applied to the celebrated painter Jan Steen.
Steen, who lived the greater part of his life in Leiden, opened an inn in 1672 on Langebrug, where he seems to have been one of his own best customers. The quotation is taken from De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlandtsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen
(1718/21) in which the painter and chronicler Arnold Houbraken recorded the lives of the major Netherlandish painters of the Golden Age. Tales about Steen’s drinking and drunkenness abound. However he was not the only one, the Schouburgh includes stories
about other painters and their intemperate behaviour.
‘A drunkard’s end is in the muddy gutter’
Earlier sources also report that drink and painting go hand-in-hand. Indeed the inebriate painter is a favourite theme among writers. Firstly because excessive behaviour with all its consequences is wonderful fodder for the gossip columns, and secondly
because the example of such painters serves as a cautionary tale. Theoretical tracts generally warning against the dangers of drink and alcohol abuse also exist. Drink could easily lead the young painter astray into immoral behaviour and intemperance,
thereby seriously damaging the profession’s reputation. In Holland these warnings were first voiced in the first volume of the Schilderboeck (1604) by the Haarlem writer and painter Karel van Mander. The profession has since had a long-standing love-hate
relationship with alcohol. On the one hand liquor was known to be a source of inspiration to the muse of the arts, while on the other the negative consequences of excess were commonly acknowledged. It was precisely to prevent young artists from falling
into this obvious trap that people like Van Mander and Houbraken strongly condemned frequenting taverns and excessive alcohol consumption.
Buffoonery with drink as the main protagonist: Hals and Brouwer
Houbraken’s Schouburgh contains several stories about artists who were heavy imbibers. His best anecdote concerns those two notorious drunkards, Frans Hals and Adriaen Brouwer. On his way to board a ship at IJmuiden bound for England, the renowned Antwerp
master Peter Paul Rubens stopped off in Haarlem to pay a visit to Frans Hals. Hals, however, was not at home but carousing at the inn, leaving the Antwerp painter and ambassador to twiddle his thumbs.
Houbraken is not alone in recounting stories of Hals’s tavern escapades. In 1621 Samuel Ampzing published his description of the city of Haarlem which figures both the Hals brothers, Dirck and Frans. About the latter he says: ‘Young artists should
emulate his honest art and vigorous brushwork, but not his conduct, since he was unable to moderate his way of life and frequently strayed from the middle way, giving free rein to his desires.’ Houbraken tells us that as a rule Hals drank himself into a
stupor every evening, and this prompted his pupils to play a trick on their master. The instigator was probably Adriaen Brouwer, who later became a celebrated painter himself. The story goes that Hals’s pupils took it in turns to escort their drunken
master home from the inn in the evenings. This particular evening was no exception. Despite his inebriated state, Hals was in the habit of reciting an evening prayer, always repeating the same line: ‘Lord, suffer me soon to enter your lofty Heaven’. This
inspired their prank: they attached their master’s bed by four ropes to four points on the ceiling and the next time Hals muttered his prayer, the bed flew up in the air. The befuddled Hals reportedly cried out: ‘Not so hasty, dear Lord, not so hasty’...
After Hals had fallen into a deep sleep the pupils slowly lowered the bed. Hals never repeated that prayer again.
For a long time Adriaen Brouwer was Frans Hals’s principal pupil. Houbraken recounts that this successful painter of inn scenes had no idea how to deal with money and that if he sold a painting for a good price he would go to earth for nine days. When
asked on his return why he was so jolly and elated, he would reply that ‘he’d unloaded some ballast’.
Destination: Rome
Houbraken’s Schouburgh also tells us about the Schildersbent, an unusual group of artists who were renowned for their excessive drinking. From the sixteenth century on, large numbers of up-and-coming artists travelled to Italy, particularly to Rome, to
study the remains (spolia) of classical antiquity, among them a comparatively large number of Netherlandish painters. The latter set up an artists’ fraternity called the Bentvueghels in Rome with the initial intention of assisting newcomers to the city.
The Bentvueghels, however, also gathered for festive occasions, such as the inauguration of new members, gatherings that were accompanied by copious quantities of drink and often lasted several days.
Bent baptism
The exhibition includes a picture from the Bredius Museum collection probably depicting a Bentvueghel inauguration. It is by Philips Koninck and has previously been associated with a bent baptism, the name given to the Bentvueghel initiation rite. One of
the regular features of the baptism of a new Bentvueghel was that the candidate, dressed as Bacchus, had to sit on a barrel. To add to the festivities all the other revellers were got up in fancy dress. In the painting none of the men surrounding the
Bacchus figure is dressed in ordinary clothes. The man on the right is even wearing a mask. The piece of parchment with seals that he holds in his right hand is most likely a sort of bull or certificate connected with the bent baptism, and probably bears
the new member’s bent name and inauguration motto. Dirck van Baburen’s bent name was Biervliech (beer fly), for example, and Jan Baptist Weenix’s was Ratel (rattle), because of the stutter he developed after suffering a stroke. Paintings by the
Bentvueghels, however, contain nothing to suggest their notorious consumption of alcohol. Jan Baptist Weenix’s Hilly Landscape with Italian Figures that he signed in the Italian style Gio[vanni] Batt[ista] exudes respectability and tranquillity.
A Jan Steen household?
Writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Houbraken said about Jan Steen: ‘The landlord of the Three Masts is sooner drunk than his guests’. To this day in the Netherlands the expression ‘a Jan Steen household’ is proverbial for Steen’s
intemperance; an epithet for the bedlam that overcomes a house where regular and excessive drinking prevails.
But what truth is there in the assertion that drink has such an enormous influence on painterly achievements? Does an artist’s conduct actually have a bearing on his accomplishments? Van Mander and Houbraken certainly warn of the consequences, but in
practice we are forced to come to a different conclusion. It is notable that artists with a reputation of being heavy drinkers, such as Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Adriaen Brouwer, Biervliech and Ratel, are among the most productive painters of the seventeenth
century. They obviously also had their clear-headed moments! In fact the entire Dutch Republic had the reputation of being a drinking nation. Strange then, that it was this century that saw the rise of this small country from nothing to one of the world’s
richest and most powerful nations. And that the painters of that era are among the most renowned in the world.