More about Twelfth-Night Feast
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For those of you who don’t know what Twelfth Night is, it’s a Shakespeare play.
But this painting has nothing to do with that. Apparently Twelfth Night is also a Christian holiday that’s supposed to mark the coming of Three Kings Day, which is a feast day to commemorate when God told Jesus, “Luke, I am your father.”
A Twelfth Night tradition is to bake a cake with a bean inside, and whoever finds the bean wins and gets to be king, which is what that kid in the paper crown is. He is king. And that’s why that woman dressed like a nun is giving a tiny bitty child some alcohol--no one dares dispute the king’s order. Such good adulting.
That’s also why the (probably drunk) man is behaving like an idiot. The teeny little child declared him court jester, and so he is jesting. He has to spend the whole night making a baby laugh.
Most everyone else is playing servant to the baby. I’ve seen a couple of Jan Steen Households in my day, but this is by far the Jan-Steen-Householdiest of them all.
Speaking of Jan Steen, he’s the one playing the violin.
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Here is what Wikipedia says about The Twelfth Night Feast
The Twelfth Night Feast is a relatively large 1662 oil painting by Jan Steen, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which bought it in 1945.
The picture depicts the Twelfth Night celebrations marking the end of the Christmas festivities and the beginning of Epiphany. It is the date when the Three Kings arrived at the stable in Bethlehem to pay homage to the newborn Jesus.
Here Steen depicts in his typical style the indoor celebrations in a well-to-do Dutch household. Children are playing on the floor with three candles symbolic of the three kings, whilst at the table, between the carousing adults, another boy offers a youngster dressed as a king a bite of his festival waffle.
Check out the full Wikipedia article about The Twelfth Night Feast
