Interior with Women Thrashing a Man (“Peasants Fighting”)

Interior with Women Thrashing a Man ('Peasants Fighting'), painted in 1671 and now in the Leiden Collection, depicts a scene of domestic violence reversed — women administering a beating to a male figure — a comic inversion of gender power that had a tradition in Dutch and Flemish popular imagery. Steen delighted in scenes of social inversion and role reversal, finding in them a vehicle for the playful moral commentary that characterises his best work. The image of a man being beaten by women drew on a tradition of popular print culture celebrating the world-upside-down — the fool punished, the bully humiliated, the unruly man brought to account by the women he had presumably provoked. Steen's treatment is characteristically ambivalent: the violence is comic but the cause of the dispute is left open to interpretation, and his compositions typically contain multiple layers of moral and social observation that resist simple readings.

The interior scene is lit with Steen's characteristic warm domestic light, the violent action of the central figures contrasted with the ordinary domestic objects scattered around them. His fluid, confident brushwork captures the motion of the thrashing with the same ease with which he depicted more tranquil subjects.