An Allegory of Winter - Jan Woutersz. Stap (1599 - 1663)

JAN WOUTERSZ. STAP
1599 - 1663
“An allegory of Winter”
Oil on canvas
Signed with monogram
Dimensions: 83 x 66 cm, 96 x 78 cm (framed)

THE ARTIST
Jan Woutersz. Stap remains one of the more enigmatic figures of 17th-century Dutch painting. Long believed to be a 16th-century artist due to his archaising style, he was reclassified thanks to a signed 1636 painting (The Landlord’s Steward) which placed him firmly in the Dutch Golden Age. Despite limited biographical data, Stap appears to have worked within a narrow but highly original framework, fusing retrograde composition with updated character insight.
He is best known for portraits or genre scenes framed within allegorical or moralizing structures. Stylistically, his work evokes the visual language of Quinten Massys, Jan Massys, and Marinus van Reymerswaele especially in the way it grapples with themes like greed, folly, wisdom, and transience.
Unlike many of his 16th-century forerunners, Stap portrays his figures with a surprising degree of empathy. Though his scenes may feel claustrophobic or oddly composed, there’s often a curious warmth a resistance to caricature that sets his work apart. Contemporary sources even suggest he painted the leathery, arthritic hands in his compositions from life, giving his figures a palpable physicality.
THE ARTWORK
This unusual and finely preserved canvas is best read as an allegory of winter, both seasonal and spiritual. A richly dressed older man red-nosed, tired-eyed sits inside a shadowy interior with a child by his side, their hands extended toward a small brazier. The painting plays on multiple levels. On the surface, it’s a literal scene of winter warmth bundled figures huddled indoors, surrounded by books and account papers. But as in Stap’s better-known compositions, there’s a deeper allegorical layer at work. The brazier (often a vanitas symbol), the meditative pose of the man, and the intergenerational exchange of warmth, hint at broader themes of aging, wisdom, transience, and stewardship.
Similar works by Stap, including examples in the RKD, confirm the thematic coherence and recurring motif of child warming hands at coals, often set against interior scenes filled with curious distortions of perspective and symbolic layering.
This composition’s power lies in its uneasy balance: sympathetic human contact set within a space that feels compressed, strange, and faintly theatrical. It asks the viewer not just to observe winter, but to feel it physically and emotionally.