The Death of Ananias(Steen Jan Havicksz called Jan Steen)
STEEN JAN HAVICKSZ called JAN STEEN
1625 1679
The Death of Ananias
Oil on panel: 18 by 14 7/8 inches (45.7 x 37.8 cm.)
Signed and dated lower right: Jsteen 1651
Provenance:
Halfwassenaar (Sale: The Hague, March 31, 1770)
Sale: Amsterdam, August 23, 1808, lot 142 (sold for 245 fls.)
Sale: Amsterdam, August 5, 1810, lot 94, purchased by Spaan
H. Croese (Sale: Amsterdam, September 18, 1811, lot 1701) purchased by van der Werf
J. Hulswit (Sale: Amsterdam, October 28, 1822, lot 112) purchased by Abels
D.J. van Eewijck van der Bildt, Haarlem, 1856
Roos (Sale: Amsterdam, October 31, 1871, lot 285) purchased by Engelberts
Besier, Utrecht, 1872
Herbrand, Paris, 1943 (according to Braun, this date should be 1945)
H.A.J. Stenger, The Hague, 1951;
Elsa S. Boas, 2000
Exhibited:
Amsterdam, 1872
Paris, Palais Bourbon, 1874 (as Terborch)
Literature:
T. van Westrheene, Jan Steen, etude sur LArt en Hollande, 1856, p. 106, cat. No.
35
H. Harvard, Les chefs-doeuvre de lécole hollandaise, Gazette des Beaux-Arts,
VI, 1872, p. 378
C. Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent
Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, 1908, Vol. I, p. 25, no. 66
E. Trautscholdt, Jan Steen, Thieme-Becker Kunstlerlexikon, XXXI, 1937, p. 512
W. Martin, Jan Steen, 1954, pp. 24, 30 31, 78, illus. No.13
K. Braun, Jan Steen, 1976, p. 90, no. 33, illus.
B. Kirschenbaum, The Religious and Historical Paintings of Jan Steen, 1977, pp. 27, 28, 60, 139, no. 66, illus. P. 155, fig. 1
K. Braun, Meesters der Schilderkunst. Het komplete werk van Jan Steen, 1980,
no. 33, illus.
B. Fredericksen, Census of Paintings sold in The Netherlands during the Nineteenth Century, I, 1997, pp. 63 and 642.
Throughout his career the great seventeenth century Dutch comic genre painter, Jan Steen, painted biblical and mythological subjects alongside his more famous and more humorous illustrations of proverbs and scenes of low life and domestic chaos. These religious paintings are among his most moving and powerful works, but have often been misunderstood as satires of history painting owing in part to the masters reputation as a humorist.[1]
The present painting is one of Steens two earliest dated paintings, together with the broadly comic and traditionally caricatured Toothpuller, dated 1651 in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, no. 165 (fig. 1). Far from the drunken lout of legend, Steen was the son of an affluent grain merchant and brewer who ensured that his son enjoyed the privilege of an education at the local Latin School before enrolling in Leiden University. Jan is reported to have later studied, presumably in Utrecht, with the innovative German history and genre painter, Nicholas Knüpfer, and later with the low life specialist, Adriaen van Ostade and the landscapist, Jan van Goyen. The artists earliest works prove that he not only mastered landscapes and peasant genre scenes but also history painting from the very outset of his career, as the date on the present picture attests. However while Steen undoubtedly learned much from the wit of Knüpfers history paintings, he chose a more direct, naturalistic and less stylishly elegant approach to figure painting. Surely aware of the values expressed by seventeenth century art theorists like Karel van Mander and Samuel van Hoogstraten that exalted history painting as the highest form of art, the young Steen was eager to try his hand at biblical and mythological themes. In this regard he followed many painters from the period that would eventually specialize in genre, including Steens fellow Leidener, Gabriel Metsu and his famous Delft colleagues, Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer, but began their professional lives painting history subjects. However few remained as devoted to these themes as Steen.
The scene depicts an episode in the life of St Peter (Acts: 5: 1-7). By their eloquence and example, the apostles persuaded men of property to sell their goods and distribute the money among the poor. One such man, Ananias, privately held back half of the proceeds for himself, with the knowledge of his wife, Sapphira. Castigated by Peter for his deceitfulness, Ananias dropped dead on the spot; his wife later suffered the same fate. Steen depicts the traditionally bearded, balding, and white-haired St Peter standing on the steps of a loggia raising his hand to the stricken Ananias, as if to emphasize the condemnation: Thou hast not lied unto man, but unto God (Acts 5.2). Beside Peter stand a group of gasping and slack-jawed citizens, among whose number are possibly other apostles, variously reacting to the drama. A child has climbed up onto the pillar to get a better view while three men bend to pick up Ananias, whose naturalistically observed pallor and distinctly rigid corpse already seem to signal the onset of rigor mortis. Steen seems to have wanted to depict the scene as realistically and accurately as possible. Details suggest that he read the biblical text closely: first, he depicts a carefully observed still life of coins and a moneybag on the ground in the lower right, following the biblical text that specifies that Ananias laid the donated part of his money at the Apostles feet (Acts 5:2); the three men who carry the body are conspicuously youthful (younger men arose and carried him out and buried him Acts 5:7); and, unlike many other artists, he correctly depicts Ananias alone, not dying with Sapphira, whose demise the Bible specifies occurred three hours later, only after her husbands burial.
Steen probably was aware not only of the Biblical source but also of the pictorial tradition of depicting the Death of Ananias. One of the most famous precedents was, of course, the design for Raphaels tapestry cartoon, which also features the gesturing Peter standing amidst columns above the stricken Ananias.[2]
Perhaps surprisingly, Steen proved by both formal quotations and references to be keenly interested in Italian High Renaissance art.[3] But he was also aware of Northern sources closer at hand, possibly including a drawing by Maerten de Vos now preserved in the British Museum, which also depicts St Peter standing above the fallen and prone Ananias amidst a crowd with a view to one side through an arch, and more probably Philip Galles print after Maerten van Heemskerk of the Death of Sapphira (fig. 2).[4] The latter is on a horizontal format but also depicts Peter on a raised step beneath a portico with observers standing above the fallen Sapphira and a glimpse to one side with Ananias carried to his burial, Italianate architecture and a broad arch. While Steens depiction of the scene is truer to the Biblical timetable in not depicting the simultaneous death of both husband and wife, he is known to have consulted Heemskerks prints extensively.[5] Still another possible source but far less accessible than a print is the painting of the theme attributed to Frans Francken I (H. Jüngeling Collection, Scheveningen, 1941), which also shares compositional similarities in the architecture and Peters powerful gesture.[6]
We have no evidence that Steens painting was a commission, however other depictions of the scene evidently were. The anonymous master known only by his monogram I.H.S. earlier executed a painting of the Death of Ananias in 1624 for the St. Pieters- en Bloklandgasthuis in Amersfoort that still hangs in situ. The subjects lesson of the true and selfless spirit of charity naturally lent itself to decorations for charitable institutions.
As the Prince of the Apostles, their leader following the Crucifixion in preaching the Gospel (the Acts), and the founder of the first Christian community in Rome, St Peter had a special importance for the Catholic Church. Kirschenbaum observed that the present painting is one of the few pointedly Catholic subjects that Steen painted.[7] Notwithstanding his Catholic upbringing and faith (his children were baptized in the Catholic Church), Steens choice of religious subjects by and large accords with the Protestant beliefs that dominated Dutch culture. He did not paint saints, except John the Baptist, martyrdoms, sacred conversations or other venerative or iconic subjects, and, as we have seen, emphasized the importance of the word in adhering to the Protestant practice of a close reading of the Biblical narrative.
W. Martin followed the penchant begun by Steens earliest biographers for identifying members of his family as models in his pictures when he speculated that the young man who appears in the center of the trio who lift Ananiass corpse was Steens son; but Braun correctly discounted the idea since the boy had only just been born in the year of this works completion. It was H. Havard who paid the picture a compliment rarely received by Steens art in the nineteenth century when in reviewing an exhibition in Amsterdam in 1872, he wrote ce petit tableau est un vrai tableau dhistoire.[8]
Comparative illustration:
Jan Steen
The Toothpuller
Signed and dated 1651
?x ? cm.
Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem, no. 165.
Philip Galle, after Maerten van Heemskerk
The Death of Ananias
Engraving.
——————————————————————————–
[1] A basic failing of B.D. Kirschenbaums The Religious and Historical Paintings of Jan Steen (London, 1977), is the assumption that he ridiculed Baroque aesthetics, whereas the work of Lyckle de Vries (Jan Steen de kluchtschilder, dissertation, Groningen, 1977; review of Kirschenbaum in Burlington Magazine, January 1978, p. 99; and Jan Steen zwischen Genre- und Historienmalerei, in Niederdeutsche Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte, vol. 22, 1984, pp. 113-28) and others have shown that Steen ascribed to the aesthetic values of his time, particularly in his creative mixture of the high and low in his history paintings.
[2] W. Martin, (Jan Steen, Amsterdam, 1954, pp. 24, 31) believed that the present painting proved that Steen knew Raphaels design, but Kirschenbaum (1977, p. 139) found the connection dubious, stressing instead Steens debt to Rembrandt especially in the head of St. Peter.
[3] Steens Wedding Feast at Cana in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, is an example of his knowledge of High Renaissance Italian art since, as C.W. de Groot first observed (Jan Steen beeld en woord, Utrecht, 1952, pp. 180-81) it is based on Raphaels School of Athens in the Vatican. It also seems to acknowledge Veroneses Marriage at Cana (Louvre, Paris), which like other Italian sources he would have known through prints.
[4] See for both D.I.A.L. (Decimal Index of the Art of the Lowlands), no. 73 F 23.3. And see respectively, British Museum, London, Popham cat. V, p. 191, no. 22, and the Acta Apostolorum, 1575, The New Hollstein (Roosendaal, 1996), Vol. 1, Part 2, cats. 395 410, specifically no. 400.
[5] For examples of Steens quotations from Heemskercks prints, see his Triumph of David in the Statens Museum, Copenhagen, and Amnon and Tamar in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne; exhibition cat. Washington, National Gallery of Art, and Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, Jan Steen. Painter and Storyteller, 1996-97, pp.79 & 216.
[6] See D.I.A.L. 73 F 23.3. (Not included in Ursula Härtungs Frans Francken II [Freren, 1989]).
[7] Kirschenbaum 1977, p. 60.
[8] Martin 1954, p. 31; Braun 1980, p. 90.
Halfwassenaar (Sale: The Hague, March 31, 1770)
Sale: Amsterdam, August 23, 1808, lot 142 (sold for 245 fls.)
Sale: Amsterdam, August 5, 1810, lot 94, purchased by Spaan
H. Croese (Sale: Amsterdam, September 18, 1811, lot 1701) purchased by van der Werf
J. Hulswit (Sale: Amsterdam, October 28, 1822, lot 112) purchased by Abels
D.J. van Eewijck van der Bildt, Haarlem, 1856
Roos (Sale: Amsterdam, October 31, 1871, lot 285) purchased by Engelberts
Besier, Utrecht, 1872
Herbrand, Paris, 1943 (according to Braun, this date should be 1945)
H.A.J. Stenger, The Hague, 1951;
Elsa S. Boas, 2000
T. van Westrheene, Jan Steen, etude sur LArt en Hollande, 1856, p. 106, cat. No.
35
H. Harvard, Les chefs-doeuvre de lécole hollandaise, Gazette des Beaux-Arts,
VI, 1872, p. 378
C. Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent
Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, 1908, Vol. I, p. 25, no. 66
E. Trautscholdt, Jan Steen, Thieme-Becker Kunstlerlexikon, XXXI, 1937, p. 512
W. Martin, Jan Steen, 1954, pp. 24, 30 31, 78, illus. No.13
K. Braun, Jan Steen, 1976, p. 90, no. 33, illus.
B. Kirschenbaum, The Religious and Historical Paintings of Jan Steen, 1977, pp. 27, 28, 60, 139, no. 66, illus. P. 155, fig. 1
K. Braun, Meesters der Schilderkunst. Het komplete werk van Jan Steen, 1980,
no. 33, illus.
B. Fredericksen, Census of Paintings sold in The Netherlands during the Nineteenth Century, I, 1997, pp. 63 and 642.
Amsterdam, 1872
Paris, Palais Bourbon, 1874 (as Terborch