Da Jan Havicksz Steen (XX) - La gabbia del pappagallo - NO RESERVE

Suggestive oil painting on canvas from Flemish provenance and dating to the early 1900s.

The work is a copy of the celebrated painting known as "Interior with a Woman Feeding a Parrot" or "The Parrot Cage" by Jan Steen (1626–1679). The original painting is preserved and exhibited at the famous Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Jan Havicksz. Steen was one of the most famous and versatile Dutch painters of the Golden Age (the 17th century), renowned especially for his ironic, chaotic, and morally pointed genre scenes.
Here are the main details about his life, his style, and his cultural impact:

1. Life in brief
Born in Leiden in 1626 to a wealthy family of Catholic brewers.
• Double profession: In addition to painting, he ran a tavern and a brewery for several years, activities that allowed him to observe human behavior up close, later immortalized on his canvases.
• Movements: He worked in several key Dutch towns, including Leiden, The Hague, Delft and Haarlem, absorbing the influences of the great local masters.

2. Style and main themes
Domestic chaos ("A Jan Steen household"): In the Netherlands there remains today the saying that denotes a disordered room or a chaotic and noisy domestic situation: "a Jan Steen household."
• Humor and satire: Unlike contemporaries like Johannes Vermeer (known for calmness and poise), Steen preferred to capture the disorder of everyday life: crowded taverns, family celebrations run amok, disobedient children, and cunning romantic entanglements.
• Hidden moral message: Behind the apparent ease and fun, his paintings almost always contain stern moral admonitions against vices such as laziness, lust, drunkenness, and gambling, often expressed through Dutch proverbs of the time or symbolic details.
• Technical skill: Despite popular subjects, his painting technique was highly refined, especially in rendering fabrics, light, the conspiratorial glances of the figures, and still lifes inserted into the scenes.

3. Famous works
In addition to "The Parrot Cage," his best-known masterpieces include:
• The Saint Nicholas’s Feast (Rijksmuseum): The perfect portrait of a family in Christmas morning chaos, with children happy for gifts and others crying for receiving only coal.
• The Effects of Intemperance (National Gallery, London): A mother asleep from the effects of wine while her children take advantage to cause damage and steal inside the house.
• The Visit of the Doctor (Rijksmuseum / various versions): A satire on doctors of the era, often depicted visiting young women suffering simply from "love sickness" or secret pregnancies.

The painting is signed bottom right Hulbe.

Conditions: painting in good condition with normal signs of age.

Canvas size 65 x 55 cm
Size with frame: 87 x 77 cm

We are not responsible for any damage to the frame due to shipping.

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For buyers outside the European Community, the waiting time for bureaucratic formalities before shipment is about 30 days.