Alchemists

Alchemists, in the Wellcome Collection in London, belongs to Jan Steen's treatment of pseudo-scientific pretension as a form of human folly comparable to the domestic disorder of his inn and kitchen scenes. Alchemy — the attempt to transmute base metals into gold — was a persistent subject in Dutch and Flemish genre painting from Brueghel through Teniers, consistently treated as an emblem of deluded ambition, wasted resources, and intellectual vanity. Steen's version would have drawn on this iconographic tradition while adding his characteristic social comedy: the distracted alchemist, the cluttered laboratory, the family impoverished while the patriarch pursues his fantasy. The Wellcome Collection's holdings of medical and scientific-subject art provide a natural institutional home for this work. Alchemy occupied an ambiguous status in seventeenth-century Dutch society — neither wholly rejected as fraud nor accepted as legitimate science — and Steen's treatment navigated this ambiguity through gentle satire.

Alchemy scenes offered Steen rich material for still-life elements: retorts, furnaces, books, scattered apparatus, the debris of failed experiments. His warm interior lighting illuminated this clutter with the same naturalistic consistency he brought to inn interiors. Figure expressions of frustrated hope or distracted obsession were rendered with his characteristic comic physiognomy.