11 July 2017 - 14 January 2018
Two portrayals of the proverb As the old sing, so pipe the young will grace the walls of the Mauritshuis starting in July. Our large painting by Jan Steen will be complemented by a painting by Jacob Jordaens, on loan from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp - a wonderful opportunity to compare these two cheerful paintings and to discover how two different artists approached the same topic.
Jacob Jordaens’ The Old Folks sing, the Young Folks chirp
At first sight, it seems as if Jacob Jordaens has depicted the proverb very literally in his painting. Three generations of a family are making music under the grandfather's guidance. A young boy is playing the recorder, and the child sitting on the mother’s lap is blowing in the small flute on his rattle. Behind the table, the father is playing the bagpipe with rounded cheeks. For the sake of clarity, Jordaens added the proverb to the depiction as an inscription: Soo d’ouden songen, soo pepen de jongen.
However, the keener observer will discover a double message. For instance, the bagpipe was an instrument of the worst sort, which would typically trigger negative associations.
The mother's feathered hat gives her a somewhat loose character, as feathers were associated with vanity in the 17th century. These adults are not able to provide a the good example, yet they are still diligently being imitated by their children on their flutes.
Jan Steens ‘As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young’
When Jan Steen painted the same proverb at the end of the 1660s, he took over the idea of the 3 generations from his Flemish predecessor. He also borrowed various themes from him: the mother with the child on her lap, the bagpipe player, and the singing grandmother with the pince-nez on her nose. However, where with Jordaens the gathering around the table still seems somewhat civilised, in Steen's case the depiction is a much more licentious one.
The family is gathered around a table where a mother with a small child on her lap is at the centre of the representation. A new father's hat, the headgear traditionally worn by the father during the baptism of a child, adorns the head of the laughing old man, hanging sideways. However, the child is too old to have been recently baptised, and the man no longer has the age of a new father. We are shown a kind of upside down world here, as is also shown by the behaviour of the parents.
The adults are unashamedly transmitting their poor habits to the children. On the left, a slumped woman with a half-open blouse is getting her wine glass refilled once again. The laughing man on the right—Steen himself— mocks his fatherly responsibilities by teaching his young son to smoke; thus literally bringing the "piping" into the picture. In the left corner, a parrot is sitting on a stick, repeating the examples just like the children.
Warning
The proverb depicted in these colourful paintings by Jordaens and Steen warns against the consequences of a poor education, but can also be explained in another way. Jacob Cats, who published a proverb book in 1632, listed "As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young" together with related proverbs under the chapter ‘’t Wil al muysen wat van katten komt’, roughly translated as "cats mouse by nature". In other words: much like a cat naturally hunts mice, human nature is also innate and immutable.
From that perspective, education would be irrelevant for a child's development. The cage on the wall with singing birds in Steen's piece could also point in the same direction, since "a bird is known by its note and a man by his talk". It is then irrelevant whether or not the adults give a good example to the youth.
