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As Sing The Old, So Pipe The Young And The Love Letter Analysis

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As Sing the Old, so Pipe the Young, and The Love Letter are both great examples of genera painting in the seventeen hundred. Although these pieces are in the same genre and time period, nevertheless they differ in many principles of art because they are two different narratives. They both share the principles of balance, use of paint, and narrative.
Jan Steen's piece, As Sing the Old, so Pipe the Young and Johannes Vermeer's, The Love Letter; both have balance. The Steen has strength in shape and great scale. The objects in the painting are in relationship with the people around the painting. It creates a feeling that everything is affected by the other elements in the picture. The Vermeer has great color that can be read as heavier and…show more content…
These paints are both genre paintings meaning they are scenes of daily life. They both have a single scene, meaning that one moment is being depicted. Usually a pivotal moment in a "story". They both have very different and interesting narratives though. In Steen's piece he "depicted the proverb ‘As the old sing, so pipe the young', meaning that a bad example leads to bad conduct" (Mauritshuis). The people are drinking heavily in front of children which shows a bad example and bad lifestyle for the children. You can see on the right the young boy taking a pipe and mimic that bad behavior, and the grown man encouraging that behavior and even laughing about it. Steen painted the people with large bodies but the children seem to have normal proportions compared to the adults. Maybe he's suggesting that adults get morphed and sin as they get older, while children are pure and whole. The women on the left also seems to be very promiscuous, with her dress unbuttoned on the top, showing a lot of cleavage for the time. What also strikes me is that her foot seems to be all the way out from under her dress and is clearly seen that her foot is on a foot warmer. Which at the time showed that you were open to new romance or just open to having a sexual relationship. In Vermeer's piece, we see a woman and her maidservant. The maidservant has just handed her a letter, and the woman looks shocked or even confused. The expression on her face is so
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