too much for him. From brewing he descended to keeping a tavern,
"in which occupation," to quote Ireland, "he was himself his best
customer". After a while, having exhausted his cellar, he took
seriously to painting in order to renew it, paying for his liquor
with his brush. Thus "for a long time his works were to be found
only in the hands of dealers in wine". Who, after this, shall have
the hardihood to speak evil of the grape?

Jan is not supposed to have lived at Leyden after his marriage to
Margaretta van Goyen, in 1649, until 1669, when his father died. In
1672 he is known to have taken a tavern at Leyden at the Lange Brug.

Of the intervening years little is known. He was probably at Haarlem
part of the time and at The Hague part of the time, In 1667 he paid
his rent--only twenty-nine florins--with three pictures "painted well
as he was able". Margaretta died in 1669--a merry large woman we must
suppose her from her appearance in Jan's pictures, and the mother of
four or five children who may often be seen in the same scenes. Jan
married again in 1673 and died in 1697.

He was buried in St. Peter's Church, Leyden, leaving more than five
hundred pictures to his name. The youth who, in the absence of the
koster, accompanied me through St. Peter's Church, so far from knowing
where Jan Steen was buried, had never even heard his name. (And at
the Western Church in Amsterdam, where Rembrandt is said to have been
buried, his resting-place cannot be pointed out. But never a Dutch
admiral's grave is in doubt.)

For all his roystering and recklessness, for all his drinking and
excess, Jan Steen's work is essentially delicate. He painted the