HOOCH, Pieter de

Two soldiers and a maid share a glass of beer in a picturesque courtyard; the tower of the Oude Kerk in the background locates the scene in Delft. The conviviality of the occasion is evident from the relaxed poses and expressions, their closeness to each other, their use of a single tall beer glass meant for passing around.

In the period from about 1657 until 1660, when De Hooch gradually refined his mature style in Delft, he produced several pairs of closely related pictures, in at least two instances straightforward replicas of a composition. There is an autograph replica of this picture in the Mauritshuis, The Hague.

Two soldiers and a maid share a glass of beer in a picturesque courtyard; the tower of the Oude Kerk in the background locates the scene in Delft. The conviviality of the occasion is evident from the relaxed poses and expressions, their closeness to each other, their use of a single tall beer glass meant for passing around.

Investigation has shown that de Hooch first drew the one-point perspective scheme and then added the figures. At an early stage, a man appeared to the left of the female servant. De Hooch later painted him out, but his outline has become visible as the upper paint layers have become more transparent over time.

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Pieter de Hooch produced some of his best genre paintings at the end of the 1550s, during his last years in Delft. A Woman Nursing an Infant with a Child and a Dog belongs to this group. In this tranquil interior a mother tenderly breastfeeds her infant. Her solicitous rectitude is imitated by the older child to her right. In an action that parallels that of her mother, the girl feeds the family dog from a dinner pot.

This minor work by Pieter de Hooch represents a transitional phase between his tavern scenes of the early 1650s and his domestic interiors and courtyard views of about 1658 onward.

While hardly unknown earlier, pictures affectionately describing the virtues of motherhood and the responsibilities of the housewife flourished remarkably on the Dutch art market during the third quarter of the seventeenth century. De Hooch could be considered the foremost representative of this development, especially in the late 1650s and early 1660s, when his finest domestic scenes were painted.

The painting is signed and dated lower left: P.D.H./A 1658.

Pieter de Hooch had moved from Delft to Amsterdam by 15 April 1661, when one of his daughters was baptized in the Westerkerk. In his Amsterdam years his domestic interiors became richer and his compositions more complex. His technique becomes progressively cruder and his late paintings often contain clumsy figure drawings and a coarse palette. In a painting such as this one, however, from his early years in Amsterdam, De Hooch applies the delicate technique of his Delft scenes to grander Amsterdam interiors.

Here a classical statuette stands over the pilastered doorway and the woman and her maid take clean linen from an ornate ‘kast’ inlaid with ebony and surmounted by porcelain. In the background a child playfully wields a ‘kolf’ stick. Paintings such as these accurately show the details of Dutch interiors of the period and it is interesting to see a portrait in an elaborately carved gilt frame hanging alongside a landscape in a simple ebony frame. Through the open door, we can glimpse the buildings on the other side of the canal.

In the interior of a grand house, a group of figures are gathered around a table playing a game of cards. The officer in the right foreground shows his hand of cards looking directly out of the picture as he does so, seemingly acknowledging the presence of the viewer and inviting us to watch the course of the game. The seated female figure is carefully considering the next card she will play while the sumptuously attired woman on the left has sprung from her chair, caught up in the excitement of it all. A canal-side scene, bathed in warm summer sunlight can be glimpsed through the doorway to the right and provides a contrast to the more animated proceedings at the table.

This genre scene was painted in the artist’s Amsterdam period but it has its origin in the interiors that De Hooch began to paint in Delft in the mid-1650s.

The painting is signed with the artist’s initials and dated lower right on the bench: P.D.H./1658. The picture was painted in Delft where the artist is recorded in 1652, and where he remained until 1661. From these years date the first works in De Hooch’s fully mature style. The move from Rotterdam, where he had lived previously, coincided with a change in subject matter and a new approach to composition. Where before the artist had been preoccupied with rustic settings, the paintings in Delft concentrate more on bourgeois society seen in the context of well-ordered and strikingly lit interiors or carefully observed outdoor scenes.

These new developments in De Hooch’s oeuvre were most probably inspired by local artists in Delft such as Carel Fabritius, Gerard Houckgeest and Emanuel de Witte, who were principally architectural painters interested in creating new illusionistic effects through the application of perspective. The View of Delft by Fabritius (National Gallery, London) stands as testimony to the form these early experiments took, just as A Lady at the Virginals by Vermeer shows the style brought to an unrivalled degree of perfection. De Hooch played a prominent part in the creation of the Delft school of painting. No earlier works had so successfully applied a cogent perspective system to the naturalistic representation of genre themes in secular spaces.

Several other paintings, also of outstanding quality, date from the same year as Cardplayers in a Sunlit Room including A Girl drinking with Two Soldiers (Paris, Louvre), A Soldier paying a Hostess (Marquess of Bute’s collection) and The Courtyard of a House in Delft with a Woman and a Child (London, National Gallery). The mood of these pictures is calm and reflective, the actions of the figures restrained, and the rhythms languorous. There is a concentration on detail, as, for example, in the depiction of the playing cards, the raised glass and the broken pipe on the floor, in the lower right corner, which clearly absorbed the artist and enthrals the viewer. Such details help to create an atmosphere that is almost palpable in its freshness. The mother-of-pearl tone of the picture is enhanced by the use of pale colours against a grey ground, assisted by blending them with white.

The view through from the shadowy interior to the sunlit courtyard in the middle distance allows De Hooch to exploit his skill in the handling of light as it falls over the different surfaces. This is particularly apparent in the rendering of the translucent curtains and the panes of glass, as well as the way in which light helps to define the forms of the figures.

If the overall visual effect of the picture is one of a highly wrought finish, this is to some extent belied by the surprisingly broad handling of paint, particularly in the figures, and the almost matter-of-fact laying in of the squares on the tiled floor. Under-drawing is visible for the layout of the floor, and several compositional changes can be detected: for instance, the man drinking to the left of the group playing cards was originally given a hat. Unlike certain Dutch paintings of this type, De Hooch seems to have made no use of symbolism. The painting hung high on the wall on the right surely does not have a hidden meaning, but the broken pipe and the playing cards are perhaps open to interpretation.

The painting remained in Holland until the early nineteenth century. In 1823 the dealer, C. J. Nieuwenhuys, stated that ‘its novelty awakened the attention of collectors both in France and England.’ Two years later it is first recorded in England. Finally, it was acquired by Lord Farnborough for George IV in 1827.

Pieter de Hooch’s painting belongs to the ‘haute-bourgeois’ genre. Through an anteroom we see a tidy living room with an elegantly clothed couple. The man is opening the cage with the parrot and the woman is enticing the bird out with a wine glass. These are clearly erotic symbols which indicate that the young woman is about to be seduced into an affair.

In the period from about 1657 until 1660, when De Hooch gradually refined his mature style in Delft, he produced several pairs of closely related pictures, in at least two instances straightforward replicas of a composition. There is an autograph replica of this picture in the Mauritshuis, The Hague.

This painting is related to the Courtyard of a House in Delft (National Gallery, London). Both canvases are dated 1658 and show approximately the same rear corner of a brick house, although there are differences between even the most similar motifs.

During the early 1660s in Amsterdam, De Hooch’s work was increasingly devoted to images of wealth and fashion; his townhouse interiors with marble floors are filled with velvety shadows and shimmering reflections. The daylight that once lingered on brick and plaster walls now skims over satin skirts and gilt leather walls.

The compositional type with an open doorway, an interior window with a curtain, an enclosed bed, and a receding wall with a window to one side, was employed by Pieter de Hooch in several paintings dating from about 1658-60. This painting is one of the artist’s most insistently rectilinear designs, in which even the figures and the dog appear to have been assigned specific places.

In seventeenth-century Holland everyday life and its activities were seen as virtues and became popular subjects for works of art. Among these highly valued activities were the housewife’s duties of nursing the children, cooking and cleaning the house, the street outside and the courtyard.

In the present painting by Pieter de Hooch everything is spotless. Apart from a couple of hens pecking at the ground, all is calm, silent and harmonious. The young woman, probably a maidservant, stands motionless, a broom and a pail in her hands. Behind her, in the middle ground, is an open gate in the fence which leads to the house; on the left another open door leads to a view of a landscape with high trees, the silhouette of a city and an expanse of blue water.

Although this painting was misattributed to Gabriel Metsu as recently as 1974, it strongly resembles works by De Hooch’s Rotterdam colleague Ludolf de Jongh. It may be assumed that De Hooch closely studied this painter’s works.

Pieter de Hooch moved to Amsterdam in 1661. While he had previously painted mostly working-class interiors, he from then on increasingly represented more affluent settings. Floors of wood and brick were replaced with marble tiles in which De Hooch creatively varied the patterns. The soldiers, maidservants and tavern frequenters gave way to ever more sumptuously attired and elegant figures. The present work fits in the painter’s Amsterdam period.

The glory of de Hooch’s genre painting is largely found in his enchanting representations of homely scenes in which a mother or maid and a children appear in an interior or a courtyard in some domestic occupation. These works, which express Dutch ideals of caring for children and the home, strike a tender note, free from sentimentality. They help us understand why his reputation is unshakable. Children play an important role in his pictures; it will be recalled, Vermeer, the father of fifteen, never painted a child.

This painting shows some influence of the Rembrandt school, in the warmth and depth of the colouring, in the golden tonality, in the broad treatment of the figures, and in the impasto passage on the white fur. The intense reddish-orange of the woman’s bodice, of the skirt hanging on the wall, and of the cradle cover are contrasted with the blue and grey in her coat, the bed curtain, the floor tiles, and the jug on the right.

De Hooch’s use of the ‘doorkijkje’, the device also employed by Nicolaes Maes of opening the vista from one room to another, and then again from there into the street is not a mere play with perspective; in his paintings it adds a pictorial and psychological note of some significance. De Hooch sensed that in daily life one often experiences a pleasant relief when a relationship between indoor and outdoor space is established by the widened outlook and by the enrichment of light and atmosphere which it brings. In his refinement of the ‘doorkijkje’ device, as well as in other respects, de Hooch shows his own character.

Pieter de Hooch developed a highly distinctive style with his depictions of middle-class and aristocratic interiors and sunny courtyards. In his interior scenes the objects are invariably painted with the utmost care, and light and shade are used to create atmosphere and emphasize the perspective.

The present scene seems to be a live account of a mother and child by a cradle with a servant woman standing next to a bed with her back to the viewer. The cooking pot over the fire suggests home and homely activities and underlines the peacefulness of the scene.

The subject of this painting is a disagreement about getting out the door without paying enough. The old soldier looks at the maidservant wearily; she holds up a coin and in no uncertain terms asks for another. Both figures appear to have performed this ritual many times before, and it must have been its routine occurrence that made the situation appealing as social comedy.

In this scene a dandified gentleman is settling accounts with the proprietress, a pretty young woman. Like many interiors by De Hooch, this one is remarkable for its rendering of light, which may be that of late afternoon. Sunlight falls at a low angle through the doorway and through the window in the background. Various highlights draw attention to the hay, the man’s red coat with its gold lining and accents, to the otherwise mundane details like the broom in the left foreground.

This portrait of a prosperous family in a private garden is one of the most distinctive works of the Delft school. In the figures as well as in the setting, the painting is remarkable for its synthesis of naturalism and formality.

In this work De Hooch represented three generations of this unidentified family, who have posed informally in their best clothes as though they had come together spontaneously for a Sunday afternoon visit. The patriarch of the family sits squarely in the foreground, his feet firmly planted on the brick walkway that leads to the open door in the wooden wall separating their courtyard from the next. His wife turns toward him holding in her hand a bunch of grapes she has taken from the fruit bowl, a gesture that contemporary viewers familiar with emblematic imagery of the day would have understood to represent fertility and fecundity. Their daughter sits with them, while behind her stand her husband on the steps and their son. The couple at the left, probably the patriarch’s son and his wife, stand before a wall covered with roses, the symbol of love, while she holds a peach, emblematic of love and sincerity. Reinforcing the pictorial message that this is a God-fearing, law-abiding family that appreciates the blessings bestowed on them is the distant presence of the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church), whose distinctive tower is seen rising beyond the orange-tile rooftops.

This painting is related to Vermeer’s Officer with a Laughing Girl. Some critics think that De Hooch’s design is derived from Vermeer’s picture, while others assume the opposite and see Vermeer as the debtor. However, the design is rather conventional and both painters may have drawn the idea from many sources.

The painting is signed left on the chair back: P.D.H.

Hooch’s painting depicts a positive ideal of the Dutch household: a clean space for a woman’s domestic work, performed before a quiet child and without the interference from men - or animals.

In this work de Hooch leant heavily on the influence of Vermeer and the Rembrandt student Carel Fabritius. Although a certain tendency towards sumptuous interiors and elegant society is already evident here, the compositional organization is charming, and the architecture of the room with its checkerboard tiles heightening the sense of depth and perspective, is rendered with painstaking precision.

When de Hooch moved to Amsterdam where he moved in high circles, his interiors became increasingly elegant, and his simple “households” were gradually replaced by palatial interiors. At the same time, the portrayal began to lose its precision and the vitality of the Dutch genre painting began to fade.

His paintings also began to lose the strong colour values so aptly described by Eug�ne Fromentin, a 19th century painter as follows: “The subtlety of Metsu and the enigma of Pieter de Hooch depend on there being much more air around the objects, shadow around the light, stability in volatile colours, blending of hues, pure invention in the portrayal of things, in a word: the most wonderful handling of light and shade there has ever been …”

This painting depicts a number of figures walking and chatting in the Council Chamber of Amsterdam Town Hall. They provide a remarkable testament to contemporary fashion.

Pieter de Hooch, born in Rotterdam in 1629 and trained in the Haarlem studio of the landscape painter Nicolaes Berchem, came to Delft in 1652. In the following year he was said to be in the service - both as a servant and a painter - of Justus de la Grange, a cloth merchant. De Hooch married in Delft in May 1654 and joined the painters’ guild in September 1655. He remained in the town until 1661, when he moved to Amsterdam. In his early years De Hooch had painted scenes of soldiers and guardrooms but after his move to Delft turned to genre scenes showing young men and women eating, drinking, playing musical instruments and flirting in well-appointed interiors. These are based on actual rooms in the houses of prosperous Delft citizens, carefully described in an effective empirical perspective.

The earliest dated examples of De Hooch’s Delft interiors are from 1658. He also painted a small number of closely related exterior scenes of which this painting, also from 1658, is the most outstanding example. It is unlikely to be a precisely accurate view as De Hooch used many of the same architectural elements in a second painting, also dated 1658, in which the right-hand side of the painting - where the maid and the child stand - was transformed to show a bower constructed with trellis-work beneath which two seated men and a standing woman drink and smoke. Both compositions are presumably based on quiet corners of Delft with which De Hooch was familiar. These and other paintings of De Hooch’s Delft years evoke a world of quiet, domestic contentment, of pleasure taken in the performance of simple household tasks and in the appearance of well-ordered surroundings. It is an art which celebrates simple virtues, the efficient running of the home and the conscientious raising of children.

De Hooch’s earliest known paintings date from about 1653-54, when he was living in Rotterdam. Inn scenes such as the Empty Glass have been compared with a wide range of tavern interiors, including approximately contemporary works by Terborch and Van den Eeckhout. De Hooch’s tonal palette of browns and yellows and to some extent his chiaroscuro effects remind one of Pieter Codde, Jan Miense Molenaer, and other artists working in Haarlem or Amsterdam. But his subjects and excitable figure types have been more closely associated with painters in Rotterdam.

Despite not belonging to the genre, de Hooch’s paintings fit the description of still-life. Strictly constructed perspective, skilful chiaroscuro, and bright colours create a sense of frozen moment that encompasses eternity.

This painting, also titled as A Merry Company with Two Men and Two Women, is one of the first genre pictures by De Hooch in which the figures rise above the level of soldiers visiting inns and in which the setting makes tentative claims to gentility. De Hooch took the ideas from Anthonie Palamedesz and Jacob van Velsen in Delft and from many painters in other cities. The Visit represents the domestication of a social theme that had earlier been set mostly in taverns and bordellos. In slightly later years De Hooch would depict more luxurious rooms and superficially more polite behaviour than he did in this key work of his early maturity.

Hints that Jan Vermeer influenced De Hooch in The Visit may be detected in the reflection of the woman’s head and red jacket in the window glass to the left (which recalls the window in Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window) and in the highlighted red jacket itself, which together with the woman in a yellow jacket and white scarf remind one of the two figures diagonally juxtaposed in the Officer with a Laughing Girl.

Military life was a topical subject during the first half of the seventeenth century in the Netherlands. Battle scenes were painted by many Dutch and Flemish artists, Esaias van de Velde and Palamedes Palamedesz being two of the most prolific representatives. During the 1630s and 1640s, when Frederick Hendrick was conducting or threatening campaigns against the Spanish Netherlands, numerous troops, many of them mercenaries, spent months in the United Provinces simply occupying border areas and waiting for orders to come from The Hague. The soldiers interaction with the local population ranged from robbery and extortion to heroic protection and from rape to romance. Idle groups of soldiers were depicted by many Dutch artists such as Pieter Codde, Willem Duyster, David Vinckboons, Jacob Duck and Anthonie Palamedesz. De Hooch’s inn scenes descend from many works in this tradition, but above all from recent pictures by Ludolf de Jongh.

In the courtyard behind a house, the red-brick walls of which are decorated with white pilasters, a man and a woman sit at a table. She squeezes a piece of lemon above her glass, while he watches with interest, as does the woman standing, who holds a glass of beer in her hand.

This painting clearly testifies to the attention De Hooch paid to perspective and spatial effect.

A man and a woman sit at a table. She squeezes a piece of lemon above her glass, while he watches with interest, as does the woman standing, who holds a glass of beer in her hand.

Soon after de Hooch’s move to Amsterdam his works gain a little more in power and body, and his colour and chiaroscuro increase in warmth. This is seen in the full character of the figures in the Woman Peeling Apples with its concentration on the motif close to the spectator without side views. The painting recalls Vermeer’s paintings of one or two figures in a lighted corner of a room, and is theme of a woman watched by a child as she works at a simple kitchen task is related to Maes’s depictions of household activities. Yet de Hooch’s painting is unmistakably his own; his ability to suggest the intensity and flow of light is undiminished, and the relationship between the woman and child absorbed in their simple activities retains human charm and naturalness.

Pieter de Hooch depicts for us incidents in the daily lives of women at home with their children: the mother watching over the cradle, serving her family at table, reading a letter or working in her kitchen. Some of his paintings show guests arriving in a spotlessly clean room or courtyard, taking a glass of wine, listening to music or conversing together. The keynote of every single picture is an intimate simplicity; the painter conducts us into a calm and quiet world, both clean and orderly, inhabited by the well-to-do. Patrons, whose preference was for something livelier, for gay and colourful peasant scenes, bought pictures by the Ostades, Jan Steen or Jan Miense Molenaer, but de Hooch was popular in the narrower circle of those who appreciated his distinctive approach and delicacy of execution. The magic of his works lies not so much in his subjects as in the means by which he interpreted them: the lucid and balanced composition, the feeling of space and the warm glow of his colours.

The sunlight streaming through the window suggests early afternoon. Reflected light and soft shadows are intermingled on the oriental rug spread over the table, the leather-backed chairs, the curtain and the lead-framed window-panes. It seems as if the quiet would be hardly broken by any sounds from far or near. The act of reading by the young woman sitting in a corner of the room is just as objectively portrayed. The atmosphere of intimacy is absolute, emanating alike from the lady and the objects included in the composition.

One of Pieter de Hooch’s innovations was the inclusion of adjoining rooms or a street, which makes his paintings full of air. It is assumed that the model of the maid in this painting was the painter’s wife.

Pieter de Hooch has gone down in art history as a painter who rendered Dutch domestic life with great precision. The private everyday life of the bourgeoisie in all its ordered tranquility, a world whose calm is never shattered by any sensational event, is the subject of his works. De Hooch opens a window on narrow alleyways, small gardens and courtyards, and gives us a glimpse into the antechambers and living-rooms of the Dutch citizens. Like Jan Vermeer, de Hooch specialized in the portrayal of interiors.

Yet, whereas the paintings of Vermeer tend to be dominated by a self-absorbed figure pausing momentarily in some activity, de Hooch’s paintings are dominated by the room itself, by its perspectives and views through doors and windows where people become an integral part of the interior. Light is an important factor, especially daylight, as in the work of Vermeer, with its refractions and reflections adding vitality to the rooms. Whereas people and animals interpose in their activities, light itself becomes the active element, permeating and moving over walls, floors and tiles, illuminating objects or casting them in shadow.

Like Vermeer, de Hooch also draws upon religious paintings, translating them into scenes of everyday life. His painting of the housewife and her maid cleaning fish in a neat backyard, for example, recalls the topos of the Virgin Mary in the hortus conclusus. Rooms flooded with light take on aspects of the Annunciation or recall Jan van Eyck’s Madonna in a Church Interior, lit by stained glass windows.

This painting is one of De Hooch’s variations on an amorous theme. The motif of pulling on a stocking and that of a dog nosing about were both recognized in De Hooch’s day as sexual innuendos when the context supported such readings.

The painting is a fragment of a broader canvas, it has lost about 17 cm on the right.

This work dates from Pieter de Hooch’s best period, 1654-62, when he worked in Delft. During these years he painted tranquil scenes of bourgeois domesticity and conversation pieces set in clearly lit interiors, courtyards, or small gardens. His subtle construction of space in depth and his refined use of lighting create an almost lyrical effect, and his style directly anticipates that of Vermeer.