Artwork Analysis: A School for Boys & Girls - Esther

School is on my mind. Pre-school aside, the past five months constitute the longest period I’ve not been in what I shall grandly refer to as a Seat of Learning in my whole life. From nursery to primary school to secondary school to teacher training college to being the teacher, including a post-graduate university stint whilst teaching full-time, I’ve been there. Apart from sleep time, much more than half my life has been spent as some sort of participant in a Seat of Learning. Over the last five months though, most of the teaching & learning has had to take place in an actual seat, in front of a computer for distance or online school. It has been a challenge for everyone concerned.

 

But mercifully that is now at an end & Scottish schools are on their way back to a more recognisable state. Our staff returns on Monday, the children on Wednesday. After all that has happened? Yes school is very much on my mind.

It seemed appropriate therefore to look at schools & education in art. This turned out to be more ill-advised than I thought. The amount of badly-rendered, sentimental & otherwise awful drivel produced in the name of art is stomach churning. Anything involving children runs this risk of course, so perhaps I’ll come back to the subject at another time when things are less generally dreadful & mawkish schlock is less of a shock.

 

Therefore I’d prefer to explore a single painting on the subject of schools. For me there could only be one contender:  A School for Boys & Girls (c.1670) by Jan Steen.

Hilarious & prolific Dutch Golden Age painter Jan Steen specialised in genre painting, that is work portraying the ordinary, the every day - less like portraiture & more like a scene containing average people getting on with their normal daily lives.

As such, he depicted schools & teachers in paintings several times. What is so great about his A School for Boys & Girls is that this classroom is far from what we’d consider ordinary or normal. Overall it’s a recognisable enough setting but on closer examination, things are going somewhat awry. It’s slightly depressing to note that the general concept of a classroom space hasn’t changed a great deal in over 400 years but that’s another story. In the meantime, let’s take a closer look at what is one of Jan’s many Baroque masterpieces. 

Composition

Completely lacking my loathed sentimentality (honestly, there’s nothing sentimental about schools until Christmas shows or end of year concerts when your main aim as a teacher is to ensure every parent/carer in the room is weeping gently yet uncontrollably), Jan’s depiction of the classroom is more of a romp, an anarchic microcosm of the wider world, detailed & uncomplicated in subject, but complex as a composition. It’s very involved, there’s a lot going on & the scene is very cluttered yet he expertly pulls your eye around the painting with the help of light, perspective & mild diagonals. The painting also roughly follows the Rule of Thirds, which prevents the image’s turmoil from being visually disordered.

Symbols 

As a painter of his time & place, Jan included a range of symbolic objects & features in many of his works. Such symbols would have a special meaning, representing something else, particularly in vanitas paintings & would have been widely recognised by viewers at the time. Sometimes the vocabulary for the items in Dutch resembled a rude word. But it’s still fun nowadays to Spot the Symbol & see how far artists will go to beat us over the head with their misplaced & unsubtle morality. Such inclusions are designed to force us to a) to take a long, hard look at ourselves & examine our lives or b) to make us feel superior because we are so sin-free & not like the appalling types shown & most importantly c) to remind us of our inevitable & well-deserved death.

 

We’re given a lot of clues about the figures in their clothing & general demeanour – they’re a rough lot, we are told. Unruly & probably living poorly.

There are some other signs:

The owl – a well-known symbol of wisdom. Hah!

The boy giving glasses to the owl – there is a Dutch proverb, “What use are glasses or light if the owl does not want to see?” Well quite.

The overturned cup & bucket on the floor – a timely reminder of the transience of life. Even when you’re only a small person at school, don’t you forget it.

Empty birdcage – to put it politely, lost innocence.

Jug – we have to hope it’s a life-giving symbol, perhaps containing something wholesome & sustaining like milk. But it looks precariously balanced. A lot like life…

Candle out – death.

Books – tricky one, as it is meant to be a school room so they should belong here. However it is Dutch Baroque, so quite honestly they could also represent the fleeting nature of all human knowledge & learning.

General disarray & mess - there will be an eventual upheaval & ending of all you have achieved & accumulated. Wake up & deal with it.

Humour

Visual comedy was key to Jan Steen’s work. In the case of this painting, the situation provides most of the humour. There’s a lot of mucking about & little kids are just funny when they’re harmlessly misbehaving. The male teacher looks like a fool. Pretending to sharpen your quill doesn’t exempt you from your teacherly duties, trust me. Some of the children’s faces are cheeky, others are sleeping.

The widespread chaos is largely ignored by the adults & they deserve all they get. At least the woman is paying attention to the well-behaved pupils. That said, part of what makes the picture amusing is that it’s not happening to me… 

Some of it is still quite accurate…

In today’s classroom there might still be one (or five) children showing off, even getting up on the table to do so like our friend at the back, but the painting presents a number of other still-familiar school behaviours such as concentration, interest, a wide variety of seated positions & postures, laughing & joking, actually paying attention to an adult, asking for adult help, chatting & doing what they like.

Thankfully, it’s not possible – nor desirable - to put children into a single, well-behaved category & expect them to do exactly what they’re told at all times. It’s nice when you’ve planned well enough to encourage engagement & therefore positive learning habits, but… Seats of Learning are not always like that.

Young people tend to have developed minds of their own after a certain point & you’re heavily reliant on their willingness to co-operate. Jan Steen has taken the disobedience & disinterest to hopefully its furthest degree. Nowadays we can always threaten to “phone home.”

This post is dedicated to Gio who has always put up with all my lockdown woes (& general school ones) & is always on my side. Also, Jan is most definitely His Man.