Remarkably, given the meager living he made from art, Jan Steen was the humorist among Dutch painters. He persevered, creating nearly eight hundred pictures, most with a moral beneath the wit. A prosperous brewer's son, Steen enrolled in Leiden University in 1646, but by 1648 he was helping to found the Leiden Guild of Saint Luke. His teachers may have included Nikolaus Knüpfer. Steen was not one
