Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/564

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534 Painting after his father, who is supposed to have obtained tha sobriquet from the care with which he conveyed the passengers on the passage-boat between Rotterdam and Dordrecht. Young Sorgh is said to have studied under Teniers the younger at Antwerp, but his style is more akin to that of Adriaen Brouwer. His pictures represent the usual Dutch interiors and exteriors of this period. He may be studied in the National Gallery. Jan Steen (1626 — 1679;, of Leyden, first studied under Nicolas Knupfer at Utrecht, and subsequently under Van Goyen, whose daughter he married. At the Belvedere, Vienna, is a Village Wedding, and at Berlin a Garden of an Ale-house, which are excellent scenes of burlesque comedy ; at the Hermitage, the Game of Backgammon, where Steen has painted himself in conversation with his wife, and an Ahasuerus touching Esther with his golden sceptre. In England, in the National Gallery, is the Music Master, and at Buckingham Palace, The Toilet, and a large number in private collections ; at Rotterdam the Malade Imaginaire, and Tobit curing his Father ; at the Hague, the celebrated Picture of Human Life, a large collection of about twenty persons executed in the finest manner of this irregular master, and the Family of Jan Steen, another collection of a dozen life-like figures, lighted up as Pieter de Hooch would have done ; in it we notice particularly the charming group of a very aged grandfather and a little urchin — the two childhoods of life ; lastly, at Amster- dam, a very celebrated scene, called the Feast of S. Nicholas. There is also the excellent portrait that the painter has left of Himself Steen delighted in scenes of mirth and revelry ; his works are characterized by broad humour and great technical abilities.