carried it.

His life has been and still is a vexed question. Volumes have been
written to prove that he was a drunkard, and volumes to prove that he
was a sober man; and, as is always the case, both sides exaggerate. He
kept an alehouse at Delft, but it did not pay; then he set up a tavern
and things went worse. It is said that he was its most assiduous
frequenter, that he would drink up all the wine, and that when the
cellar was empty he would take down the sign, close the door, and
begin to paint furiously, and when he had sold his pictures he would
buy more wine and begin life again. It is even said that he paid for
everything with his pictures, and that consequently all his paintings
were to be found in wine-merchants' houses. It is really difficult to
explain how he could have painted such a large number of admirable
works if he was always intoxicated, but it is no less difficult to
understand why he had a taste for such subjects if he led a steady,
sober life. It is certain that, especially during the last years of
his life, he committed every sort of extravagance. He at first
studied under the famous landscape painter Van Goyen, but genius
worked in him more powerfully than study; he divined the rules of his
art, and if it sometimes seems that he has painted too black, as some
of his critics have said, it was the fault of an extra bottle of wine
at dinner.

Steen is not the only Dutch painter who, whether deservedly or not,
won a reputation for drunkenness. At one time nearly all the artists
passed the greater part of their day in the taverns, where they became
famously drunk, fell to fighting, and whence they came out bruised and
bleeding. In a poem upon painting by Karel van Mander, who was the
first to write the history of the painters of the Netherlands, there
occurs a passage directed against drunkenness and the habit of
fighting, part of which runs as follows: "Be sober and live so that
the unhappy proverb 'As debauched as a painter' may become 'As
temperate as an artist.'" To mention a few among the most famous
artists, Mieris was a notable winebibber, Van Goyen a drunkard, Franz
Hals, the master of Brouwer, a winesack, Brouwer an incorrigible
tippler; William Cornelis, and Hondecoeter were on the best terms with
the bottle. Many of the humbler painters are said to have died
intoxicated. Even in death the history of the Dutch painters presents
a thousand incongruities. The great Rembrandt expired in mis