The Visit

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.