Man Sleeping

Man Sleeping, in the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, belongs to Jan Steen's extensive treatment of sleep as a moral and social state within domestic and public contexts. In Dutch genre painting, a sleeping male figure could encode laziness, drunkenness, or merely the exhaustion of legitimate labour, and the surrounding context — what objects were nearby, what was happening around the sleeping figure — typically made the moral valence clear. Steen's sleeping men were usually embedded in contexts that made their inattention comedically or morally consequential: something was happening while they slept that they should have been preventing or attending to. The Bristol Museum's holding reflects the strong British provincial collecting of Dutch genre painting. The panel support suggests a smaller, more intimate format than Steen's large canvas compositions.

The single sleeping figure required Steen to animate a passive subject through surrounding context and through the physical rendering of the sleep state itself — the slumped posture, the relaxed facial expression, the lolling head. The panel support permitted fine rendering of fabrics and the still-life objects that encoded the scene's meaning.