Jan Steen’s Rhetoricians at a Window is a fascinating look at the life of a Dutch rederijker in the 17th century.

Rhetoricians at a Window

In Rhetoricians at a Window “the rhetoricians are not in a hothouse, nor in an enclosed environment, but out in the open. The viewer is at street level, and the rhetoricians are leaning out toward the viewer. Completed sometime during the 1660s, Steen’s work is one of the many he did on the rederijkers, the rhetoricians who played a large part in popular entertainment in the Netherlands. As Heppner explains, ‘The Rederijkers were organized throughout the Netherlands in kamers or chambers, which were in touch with one another and gave joint performances, such as dramatic competitions.’

By nature, and perhaps by occupation in this case, rhetoricians are social creatures. Steen was apparently friendly to a group of rederijkers, inasmuch as painters often helped with the scenery for the rederijkers’ dramatic performances.

Six figures are near the window. Among them are a robust man closely attending to a text, as if he needed light to make out the dark characters; some people in a darkened background, perhaps representative of the sinister side of rhetoric; and someone with a gesture of delight, or perhaps insight, who is smiling. Some of these figures converge at a liminal point – the window, a place that opens out on to something larger. Think of the open window in connection with talk of the open hand in rhetoric as opposed to the closed fist of logic. If nothing else, Steen’s painting could be said to exhibit the social nature of rhetoric, for it is not a rhetorician at a window, but rhetoricians; a solitary rhetorician would be an oddity. In the many paintings of rhetoricians that Steen produced, all involve groups, and several times he depicts them at a window. Furthermore, the blazon hanging from the window displays an emblem of a particular rederijker group. The emblem [not visible in this image of the painting] consists of crossed pipes and a wineglass, which are underneath an inscription that reads, ‘the green laurel shoot.’ The emblem tells us that the rederijkers were ‘as much social as literary.’

The vine around the window ‘probably alludes to the rederijkers’s love of the grape.’”*

* Traveling with Hermes: Hermeneutics and Rhetoric, Bruce Krajewski, 1992, University of Massachusetts Press