Het vrolijke huisgezin c. 1860 - 1900

Johannes Arnoldus Boland made this etching entitled 'The Merry Family' in the Netherlands during the late 19th century. It depicts a chaotic scene of music and revelry, perhaps around the occasion of a birth. The artist is playing with a well-worn trope of Dutch genre painting: the boisterous domestic interior. But where painters like Jan Steen used such scenes to explore moral themes, Boland seems more interested in the formal possibilities of a densely populated composition and the sheer enjoyment of family life. Boland was working at a time when Dutch artists were looking back to the Golden Age of painting for inspiration, but also re-evaluating the role of art in a rapidly changing society. Archival research into exhibition history and art criticism of the time would allow us to say more about the artist's place in Dutch cultural life. Through an understanding of its historical context we can best understand what kind of statement Boland was trying to make about Dutch society.