Currently indexing
The Village School depicts a boy being punished by a teacher. Some other pupils, whose facial features are based on those of the artist’s children, look at their poor classmate. Among the objects on the wall are boxes that children used for bringing their books to school. Steen also places bottles in a niche on the left of the painting. Many schoolteachers doubled up as landlords in seventeenth-century Holland, which lead authors, painters and printmakers to portray them as alcoholics. The teacher’s clothes are distinctly old-fashioned and therefore make him look foolish.
March 2016
Old Masters Exhibition, Burlington House, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1883
Exhibition of Dutch Art, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1929
Dutch Pictures 1450-1750, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1952-1953
Il Seicento Europeo, Palazzo del Espozizioni, Rome, 1956-1957
Jan Steen, Mauritshuis, Den Haag, 20 December 1958 - 15 February 1959
Centenary Exhibition, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, October - December 1964
The Age of Rembrandt, Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1966-1967
Masters of 17th Century Dutch Genre Painting, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; Royal Academy, London, 1984
Master European Paintings from the National Gallery of Ireland, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 6 June - 9 August 1992; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, 19 September - 6 December 1992; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 13 January - 28 March 1993; IBM Gallery, New York, 27 April - 26 June 1993
Communication: Visualising the Human Connection in the Age of Vermeer, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, Kyoto, 25 June - 16 October 2011; Miyagi Museum of Art, Sendai, 27 October - 12 December 2011; The Bunkamura Museum of Art, Tokyo, 23 December 2011 - 14 March 2012
The Art of Upbringing, Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht, 28 April - 15 September 2013