Woman at her toilet (Steen)
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A woman at her toilet is an oil painting by the Dutch painter Jan Steen . It has been signed or dated 1663 and is in the British Royal Collection . It measures 65.8 × 53.0 cm and the picture frame measures 82.6 × 69.4 × 6.0 cm.
description
The painting shows a partially undressed young woman putting on a stocking. Her jacket is open and her shoes are strewn on the floor. A lap dog lies on her unmade bed with a chamber pot. The figure is seductive and looks directly at the viewer with an inviting expression. Your bedroom opens behind an imposing arched door between two columns with Corinthian capitals on cartouche-decorated plinths and the door arch is decorated with tendrils and a weeping cherub. However, the viewer himself is kept away from the room.
The artist's ingenuity extends from the pictures to a play on words: the Dutch word for stocking (kous), which is used for fornication, and the Dutch word for chamber pot (piespot), result in pieskous - a derogatory word for women in slang.
Signed in the left column: JSteen (JS in the monogram) and in the right column dated: 1663. To understand the meaning of the artist's signature on the column, you have to know that “Steen” means “stone” in Dutch.
interpretation
The clear and deliberate contrast between inside and outside clearly shows the scene as an allegorical painting: the arched entrance is a threshold that no sensible person should cross, however strong the temptation may be. His arch shows the symbolism of the sunflower (persistence), the grapevine (domestic virtue) and the weeping cherub (chaste profane love), which represents moral honesty. In the room, the viewer is confronted with a variety of vanitas motifs: a lute with a broken string , a skull intertwined with a vine, a candle with an extinguished flame and a jewelry box with a lid that is wide open. All of this symbolizes the temporary effects of misguided sensual pleasure. Even donning a stocking had a clear message that the emblem book sense Poppen of Romans Visscher is found (1614): Boisterous behavior as too rapid donning a stocking could mean that he is holed, as well as lead the yielding of sensuality to ruin could. Steen implies that by crossing the arch of the door, you risk losing virtue. So it makes sense that the inside means pagan love and the outside means spiritual love.