JOHN BAPTIST WEENIX, THE YOUNGER.

Was the son of the preceding, and born at Amsterdam in 1644.  Possessing less varied talent than his father; he was unrivaled in painting all sorts of animals, huntings, dead games, birds, flowers, and fruit.  He was appointed Court painter to the Elector Palatine, with a liberal pension, and decorated his palace at Bernsberg with many of his choicest works.  He painted in one gallery a series of pictures representing the Hunting of the Stag; and in another the Chase of the Wild Boar, which gained him the greatest applause.  There are many of his best works in the Dusseldorf Gallery.  He painted all kinds of birds and fowls in an inimitable manner; the soft down of the duck, the glossy plumage of the pigeon, the splendor of the peacock, the magnificent spread of an inanimate swan producing a flood of light, and serving as a contrast to all the objects around it, are so attractive that it is impossible to contemplate one of his pictures of these subjects without feeling admiration and delight at the painter’s skill in rivaling nature.

JAN STEEN.

The life of this extraordinary artist, if we are to believe his biographers, is soon told.  He was born at Leyden in 1636.  He early exhibited a passion for art, which his father, a wealthy brewer of that city, endeavored to restrain, and afterwards apprehending that he could not procure a comfortable subsistence by the exercise of his pencil, established him in his own business at Delft, where, instead of attending to his affairs, he gave himself up to dissipation, and soon squandered his means and ruined his establishment; his indulgent parent, after repeated attempts to reclaim him, was compelled to abandon him to his fate.  He opened a tavern, which proved more calamitous than the former undertaking.  He gave himself up entirely to reveling and intoxication, wrought only when his necessities compelled him, and sold his pictures to satisfy his immediate wants, and often for the most paltry prices to escape arrest.

JAN STEEN’S WORKS.

The pictures of Jan Steen usually represent merry-makings, and the frolics and festivities of the ale-house, which he treated with a characteristic expression of humorous drollery, that compensated for the vulgarity of his subjects.  He sometimes painted interiors, domestic assemblies, conversations, mountebanks, etc., which he generally accompanied with some facetious trait of wit or humor, admirably rendered.  Some of his works of this description are little inferior to the charming productions of Gabriel Metzu.  His compositions are ingenious and interesting, his design is correct and spirited, his coloring chaste and clear, and his pencil free and decided.  He also had a good knowledge of the chiaro-scuro, which enabled him to give his figures a fine relief.