Everyday painter

Pieter de Hooch's mundane magic

by William Corbett

Pieter de Hooch is getting his first retrospective 314 years after his death. The exhibit, which originated in England, follows by two years the celebrated DC retrospective devoted to de Hooch's near-contemporary and fellow painter in Delft, Johannes Vermeer. If this is as far as current interest in 17th-century Dutch genre painting goes, we owe everyone involved a salute. De Hooch is a wonderful painter whose domestic scenes radiate a life-affirming balance, order, and light.

In the show's catalogue, curator Peter C. Sutton tells us, "Little is known of the artist's life." This comes as a surprise. All 38 of de Hooch's paintings here are in excellent condition, indicating that they have been well cared for since they were painted. Yet we know almost nothing about the man who painted them -- neither, for that matter, do we know very much about Vermeer. Perhaps those who own genre paintings have always loved them and felt responsible for them. Perhaps the Dutch knew how to value the art above the artist. Or, more likely, perhaps the tender intimacy in de Hooch's work inspired tenderness in return.

You register this tenderness everywhere in a de Hooch canvas. It is in the light, which comes from many sources. It is in the open doors and windows through which the out-of-doors is one with the domestic interiors and both are safe. It is in his deep feeling for children.

In all three particulars de Hooch differs from Vermeer. Vermeer's light falls, usually from the left, onto his scenes with a glare-like intensity. De Hooch's light is diffuse, more a matter of feeling than of intellectual concentration. Where Vermeer shines a spotlight (he may have been nicknamed the "Sphinx" because viewers wondered why he wanted them to look so hard at his figures), de Hooch disperses light and air. Where you might feel that you have intruded upon one of Vermeer's women she's so deep in thought, de Hooch's mothers are seen in action, breast-feeding their babies, picking nits from a child's hair, or holding a child's hand. We know that Vermeer fathered 15 children, yet not a single child appears in his work. Children abound in de Hooch's work, and he clearly loved them with unsentimental matter-of-factness.

All of these features and more can be seen in The Courtyard of a House in Delft with Woman and Child (1658). In Hartford, de Hooch's masterpiece (a judgment with which Seymour Slive concurs in his authoritative Dutch Painting) is given pride of place along with the similar Figures in a Courtyard. Courtyard of a House was also chosen for the exhibit's logo, and it appears on the banner outside the Atheneum and the exhibition guide available inside. It deserves this attention for its superior quality and because it is an excellent way into de Hooch's work.

De Hooch loved open doors. There are two here and, to the left, an open window shutter. These let other worlds in, the outer world of the Delft street upon which we see a woman gaze, and the inner, private world we can guess at to the right. The mother, dressed for everyday, cradles a bowl and holds the hand of a child who is dressed in her image. She could be answering a question about what she carries or what they will do next. The pose is as realistic as the activity is ordinary, and the eye that has paused over mother and child shifts to take in the entire scene.

The pattern of the floor's yellow brick is typical of de Hooch, who had a passion for household patterns on floors, walls, and ceilings. And for brick, as can be seen around the archway and in the thinner, crumbling bricks of the right wall. (For what it's worth, we know that his father was a master bricklayer.) De Hooch loved order, the everyday and domestic order that we mostly take for granted until a painting or a particular pattern of sunlight coming through a window into our own kitchen causes us to stop and muse on an arrangement of bricks or tiles.

When I entered the exhibition, there was a professor of art history lecturing before a large group. As they looked at this painting, he pointed out the tablet above the archway identifying it as existing in Delft's Hieronymusdael Cloister. He read its inscription, "This is St. Jerome's vale, if you wish to repair to patience and meekness. For we must first descend if we are to be raised." The professor explained that this gave to an otherwise ordinary scene a spiritual dimension. The tablet may do that, but it seems to me that the professor missed the true spiritual element in de Hooch's picture.

This can be found in the whisk broom and bucket, the vine on its trellis above the mother and child, the iron door pull on the old wooden door -- the spiritual is in the ordinary, and de Hooch's tender, masterful strokes (the way his brush follows the contour of his figures) reveal this in almost every picture in this show. Yes, we might look upon the tablet's words and consider their relevance for our lives. But if we do, the descent they urge us to take is into the ordinary, the meek and patient world in which we live. It is in this world that we experience the eternal. Our own immediate ordinary may be neither as clean nor as prosperous as those de Hooch depicts, but we all know the currents of deep feeling and thought that flow from losing ourselves in contemplation of the homeliest object. "No ideas," our master poet William Carlos Williams wrote, "but in things."

And so the eye alights on the buttery orange glow of floor tiles in the bedroom where a mother, totally absorbed, searches for the nits in her daughter's hair. Then the eye moves to a dog that looks at the pattern of light cast by the sun coming through an open mullioned window. We note the orange on a high mantelpiece under which a mother nurses her child and the red cloth of the mother's skirt. (De Hooch is as expert with fabric as Vermeer.) We might think of this nursing mother as a Madonna and then go off into lofty spiritual thoughts. But for de Hooch, and I think for his audience, the nursing mother is our daily portion of the eternal.

Dutch genre painting of this period looks so realistic that it is natural to wonder whether this is how these people really lived. In fact de Hooch and his peers based their pictures on what they saw, but the rooms and courtyards never actually existed as such. They were imagined. The Dutch wanted the magic of art, their world both as they knew it and new to them, refreshed.

We know one curious fact about de Hooch. He died in a lunatic asylum. We can only conjecture the decline that led to this fate, but something knocked him out of the world of order and light in his paintings and landed the poor man in bedlam.