Like the children in his picture, we would steal down in the morning to see what the saint had left in our shoes, placed near the fireplace (to give him easy access through the chimney). Nicholas, like millions of other Dutch children we ate the same gingerbread, spiced cakes, and biscuits that Steen painted. The three centuries separating its creation from my first view meant little. But part of the attraction of Steen’s painting, I think, was that it looked so contemporary. It is hard to recapture childhood impressions exactly. But then came the painting that truly grabbed my imagination, more than the Night Watch, or even Van de Velde’s naval battles: Jan Steen’s The Feast of St. (Is Van Gogh’s chair better than his sunflowers? Maybe.) We ambled through the rooms of maritime paintings by Willem van de Velde-gallant little Dutch ships blasting away at British galleons-which I liked a great deal.

Then again, overfamiliarity makes it hard to judge the quality of a great icon. Perhaps she was right about the Night Watch. She was forever spotting fakes too: fake Titians, fake Rembrandts, fake Rubenses. We saw Rembrandt’s Night Watch, of course, and my aunt pointed out that although this was the most famous painting in the world, Rembrandt’s Staalmeesters-the Syndics of the Drapers Guild-was actually a much finer work. When I was about eight or nine, my aunt, a professional painter of children’s portraits, took me to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. I can remember clearly the first time I fell in love with a painting.

An artist of the floating world review