![]() ![]() Once the idea of the artist as bohemian had solidified in the mid 19th century, a large number of artists emerged who truly were tosspots. When Jan Vermeer ( 1632–75) paints an enigmatically interrupted bourgeois idyll such as The Girl with the Wine Glass (1659–60), the centre of consciousness is the goosey girl, part naive and part knowing, who delights in being chatted up by the roguish gander, even as an allegory of Temperance looks on disapprovingly from the stained-glass window. 1525–69) paints The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559), carnival is clearly coming out on top within what we might call the libidinal economy of the painting, even while any respectable burgher knows he should side with Lent. Many Dutch drinking scenes try to have their cake and eat it, by offering themselves as allegories of moderation – take Steen’s Wine is a Mocker (1663–64 – while revelling in the possibilities for sensuous excitement, stirred flesh and dynamic composition that drunken misrule presents. As Seymour Slive has written, ‘the fallacious idea that an artist who depicted merry drinkers must needs have been a tosspot himself dies hard’. In his autobiography Praeterita (1885–89), John Ruskin described how he inherited the prejudice, which he would never shake off, that ‘the old Dutch school’ were ‘sots, gamblers, debauchees, delighting in the reality of the alehouse more than in its pictures’. The phrase ‘a Jan Steen household’ is still proverbial in Dutch for a home in rowdy disarray, after his many scenes of disordered domestic and public houses. Houbraken is open about his inversion of the biographical fallacy, whereby he constructs the life from the nature of the work, writing that ‘Steen’s paintings are as his way of life and his way of life as his paintings’. Recent scholarship has shown the myth of the drunkard painters of the Dutch Golden Age to be largely without foundation – a product of an incautious identification of artists with their subject matter, and a misunderstanding of just how respectable and dignified brewers were as civic figures. 1626–79) has a similar tenor to that of Hals, with many of its anecdotes focusing on Steen’s other work as a brewer and innkeeper. Two hundred years later, on meeting a former lover of his who had returned from service in the First World War, Somerset Maugham remarked: ‘You may have looked like a Bronzino once, but now you look like a depraved Frans Hals.’ The suggestion is of a face like Hals’ The Merry Drinker (1630), rosaceous, worn and worldly. It claims that Hals was ‘filled to the gills every evening’, and that when Anthony van Dyck came to meet him in Haarlem he was not at home, and ‘it took a long time to scour the taverns for him’. ![]() The image of Hals as an alcoholic and wife-beater was established by Arnold Houbraken’s colourful biography in The Great Theatre of Dutch Painters (1718–21). The earliest drunkard painter of legend is Frans Hals (1582/83–1666). ‘Wine is a Mocker’, 1663–64, Jan Steen (c. By the time Kramer wrote his poem, the myth had become self-fulfilling. In disavowing the link between artistic inspiration, heightened creative powers, and the use of alcohol, the poem attests to how firmly the myth was established in the popular mind. The anachronism implies a continuity between the myths of hard-drinking artists from different eras: as if the beer-swilling painters of the Dutch Golden Age, the absinthe-addled wretches of 19th-century Paris, the tough guys of the New York School, liquored-up and rowdy at the Cedar Tavern, and several generations of British artists, stumbling out drunk in the late afternoon from Soho’s Colony Room Club, could all be imagined in some timeless bar- room. The reader is invited to imagine Dürer and Rubens taking a booth in an uptown cocktail bar. The dry Martinis, whiskey sours and double scotches belong to the 20th-century booze-hound, particular about his drinks and able to afford quality liquor. When the humorist Arthur Kramer published these lines under the title ‘Homily for Art Students’ in the New Yorker in 1946, he mixed up a potent brew of historical beliefs about art and drinking. ![]()
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