The Sick Greybeard (or, "January and May")

The Sick Greybeard (or, 'January and May'), in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, belongs to Jan Steen's comic examination of mismatched marriages and inappropriate desire. The 'January and May' title invoked a long European literary and visual tradition — traceable to Chaucer — of the old man married to a young woman, whose vitality and desire the old husband could not match or contain. Steen's treatment was characteristically comic rather than tragic: the old man's illness, real or feigned, provided an opportunity to observe the domestic comedy of a household in which the power relations between January and May were visibly strained. The Hermitage's Steen holdings reflect the strong Russian imperial collection-building of Dutch Golden Age painting from the eighteenth century onward. The undated work is consistent with Steen's mature period, likely 1660s-70s.

The mismatched-couple subject required Steen to maximise the visual contrast between the greybeard's decrepit appearance and the young woman's vitality. He achieved this through physical contrast — the old man's bent form against the woman's upright bearing — and through the warm light that favoured the young woman's complexion while making the man's pallor more apparent.