The Family Concert (1666): Artwork and History

The Family Concert (1666) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Jan Steen (Dutch, 1626–1679).

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

This well-appointed interior sets the scene for the courtship ritual of music-making, through which men and women became acquainted by singing and playing instruments together. The boy in the foreground, mimicking the adults, strums a cello with a pipe and breaks a string, a subtle allusion to the perils of unbridled passion. Jan Steen, one of the Dutch Republic’s most prolific comic painters, crafted his scenes upon the contemporary notion that comedy mirrors everyday life.

Object facts

• Title: The Family Concert
• Date: 1666
• Artist attribution: Jan Steen (Dutch, 1626–1679)
• Place of origin: Holland
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Dimensions: 86.6 × 101 cm (34 1/8 × 39 3/4 in.); Framed: 101.6 × 115.6 × 5.1 cm (40 × 45 1/2 × 2 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
• Reference number: 1891.65

Collection credit

Gift of Timothy B. Blackstone

View the original

Explore the artwork in the Art Institute's collection, including its image and the museum's current catalogue details.

The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.