The jovial humanity of Steen and the joy that he took in humorous characterization were responsible for the deficiencies he often exhibited as a painter. He would frequently be more interested in the subject than in the technicalities of an artistic problem; which, as we have seen, is precisely the reverse of the attitude that most of the great genre painters came to adopt. They were concerned primarily with the making of a picture; Steen was quite frequently engrossed with the delineation of a phase of life. He was so interested in the story-telling element of the subject that under some circumstances he permitted himself to supersede the pictorial quality of the presentation. This should be frankly recognized in approaching the study of Jan Steen, otherwise by coming upon one or two of his inferior examples we may be led into a hasty depreciation of this great artist. He belonged to an old respected family of Leyden, where he was born about 1626, his father being a brewer in prosperous circumstances. The son’s name is inscribed in the records of the University of Leyden, as having been one of its students in 1646; then we hear of him as a pupil of Nicolaes Knupfer, the painter of genre and of Biblical and mythological subjects. Afterward Steen studied with Jan van Goyen, whose daughter Margaret he married. He was one of the first members of the local Guild of St. Luke, established in 1648. From 1649 to 1654 he lived at The Hague; then returned to Leyden for seven years, during which time he owned a brewery near Delft. From 1661 to 1669 he resided at Haarlem, but in the last year lost his wife and returned to Leyden, where he remained until his death in 1679. In 1672 he had obtained permission from the magistrate of Leyden to maintain a café at his house, and the following year took a second wife, Maria van Egmont, the widow of a local bookseller. Houbraken states that they lived happily together, though their larder was often ill-stocked; but he is not so charitable toward Steen’s connection with the liquor trade. This fact, coupled with the jovial character of the artist’s pictures and enlivened [Illustration: THE INN JAN STEEN HAGUE MUSEUM]