In George IV’s inventory of Carlton House this painting was described as ‘A Card party; Portraits of Wouwerman Jan Steen, Heemskirk etc’, the suggestion being that the host holding a pewter tankard is Jan Steen (he had a short-lived second career as a landlord running a brewery in Delft), while the other figures facing the viewer are to be his artistic compatriots Philips Wouwerman (1619–68) and Egbert Jaspersz. van Heemskerck (1634–1704). In fact there is little to support these identifications other than the fact that Jan Steen often inserted his own self-portrait into his scenes of everyday life, alongside images of his friends, children and two wives. Here the figure of the apron-wearing man does bear some facial resemblance to Jan Steen. In his accepted self-portraits of this type Steen more frequently shows himself looking out towards the viewer, a complicit participant in the scene, usually a member of the supporting cast rather than a key protagonist, laughing along with the transgressors around him. In some he is very recognisable, in others there is only a fleeting likeness.

Eighteenth-century sale catalogues reveal that the identification of a Steen self-portrait in one of his genre scenes was an attractive selling point and the same was surely true in the seventeenth century: buyers would have enjoyed being in on the artist’s private joke. Steen’s frequent appearance in his pictures, his experience as a landlord in the 1650s and his well-documented financial difficulties have led to a conflation of his personal life with the scenes of misbehaviour he so often depicted. The degree to which the figures were deliberately intended as self-portraits, as opposed to generalised character types, has since been reassessed: they were probably intended more as a form of artistic signature than an accurate record of the artist’s behaviour and attitudes.

Text adapted from Portrait of the Artist, London, 2016

Signed lower right: 'JSteen'