The poetry of everyday life
Pieter de Hooch was one of the first artists to depict ordinary women in their own homes, but, as Nick Trend points out, he was also subtly holding them to account
Long overshadowed by Vermeer, pioneer Pieter de Hooch deserves celebration, believes Nick Trend
PIETER DE HOOCH (1629–84) has long suffered in the shadow of his far more famous 17th-century contemporary Johannes Vermeer (1632–75). The two artists worked in the same town—delft in the southern Netherlands—and must surely have known each other. Yet, whereas Vermeer’s paintings have, centuries later, achieved iconic status, de Hooch is now much less well known. Last month, the first exhibition devoted to his work ever to be held in Continental Europe opened in Delft. Aiming to re-evaluate his importance as one of the greats of the Dutch Golden Age, it brings together 29 of his paintings from museums all over the world and they serve as a powerful reminder of a truly remarkable moment in art history.
One of the works on display at Delft’s Museum Prinsenhof caught my eye in particular. The Mother (Fig 1) shows a woman sitting by her bed and gazing down at a wicker crib. There is a half smile on her face and a slightly tired look in her eyes as she laces up her bodice. It seems she has just breastfed her new-born child and it is now sleeping peacefully, hidden from our view by the hood of the crib.
The room itself is suffused in warm sunlight that streams through the windows and
Suddenly, painters started to look at people as subjects in their own right
doorways, reflecting off the polished floor tiles and whitewashed walls. The source of that light seems to be intriguing the other figure in the painting—a little girl aged, perhaps, six. She stands with her back to the viewer, gazing through the half-open front door, one heel slightly lifted as if she is about to make a step forward. She is curious, but hesitant. One day, we might reflect, she will leave the shelter of this idyllic house and go out into the world. One day, she, too, will have a child of her own.
De Hooch’s painting seems, at first sight, like a charming insight into the most common of domestic scenes, a meditation on the rhythm of life and a brilliant evocation of the quiet stillness of a room on a sunny day. And yet it also encapsulates an artistic revolution—one so radical that it marked a fundamental change in the way that human beings saw themselves.
If that sounds like a melodramatic overstatement, think of it like this. Before the 17th century, artists had hardly ever depicted the everyday world in a naturalistic way. True, Bruegel had evoked the working life of peasants two or three generations earlier. But his were crowded, often comic or satirical scenes, not intimate, personal moments in a private home. Some religious paintings— especially those made in northern Europe —had also represented, say, scenes from the childhood of the Virgin Mary as if they were happening in a contemporary bedroom or living room. And some portraits—most famously, perhaps, Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait of 1434 (now in the National Gallery)—might have given a glimpse of the interior of an impressive reception room. But these were formal works depicting momentous events or people of high status, not an insight into the life of an ordinary woman looking after her children at home.
Only when a new type of society began to develop in Holland in about 1600 did such scenes start to be considered a worthy subject for art. Newly independent of Spanish rule, with a Calvinist work ethic, a powerful navy and an adventurous trading fleet, the Netherlands quickly developed a burgeoning, prosperous and sophisticated middle class. They loved art and they wanted to decorate their new, smart canal-side homes, not with religious paintings, but with images of their own familiar world. Hundreds of artists prospered from this demand, usually specialising in particular genres, such as landscape, portraiture, musical, brothel or military scenes or, as with de Hooch, pictures of everyday domestic life. Suddenly, painters started to look at the world and the people around them not as backdrops or extras to be used in some grander scene or event, but as subjects in their own right.
De Hooch was working at the height of this artistic revolution in the 1650s and 1660s. Like Vermeer, who was three years younger, he specialised in beautifully crafted, calm, light-filled interiors, but he also developed his own distinctive genre of domestic scenes set in the garden courtyards behind the terraced houses of Delft (Fig 2). Also like Vermeer, many of his paintings were populated by women going about their daily tasks. Indeed, one of de Hooch’s works, A Woman Weighing Gold and Silver Coins, actually seems to have directly inspired Vermeer’s painting Woman Holding a Balance.
In the Prinsenhof exhibition, we also see women sewing, spinning, cooking and sweeping and so on, often in the company of their children. De Hooch creates a seemingly timeless, unhurried world where the sun always shines, babies never cry and labour has become a pleasure, but the pictures nevertheless give a startling insight into everyday life. The women nurse their children and even pick nits from their hair (Fig 5). They make the beds and bleach the linen. One remarkably beautiful painting shows a maid and her mistress quietly working together, placing neatly folded sheets into a cupboard.
It would be wrong to think, however, that de Hooch’s paintings were straightforwardly naturalistic. They certainly depicted scenes that would have been immediately recognisable at the time: it was clearly important for his pictures to seem real. However,
as were many of his contemporaries, he was happy to adapt reality for his own purposes.
For example, A Woman and Child in a Bleaching Ground shows a view of Delft’s Old Church and its tower (Fig 3). The buildings are clearly recognisable (Fig 4), but de Hooch re-arranged their locations slightly to suit his own compositional ends. At the same time, he took enormous trouble to render the finest details in his pictures with meticulous accuracy, from the patchy grass in the foreground of this painting to the mottled, mortar-stained brickwork of the garden wall on the left. (It’s always worth having a close look at de Hooch’s walls, tiled floors and pavements—his father was a bricklayer and he clearly loved the challenge of getting the effects precisely right).
No doubt, he took a similar approach to adapting and idealising his interior scenes. We can never be sure, because the rooms no longer exist, but we can be confident the details are meticulously observed and that is why—even today—they feel so real.
There was another reason behind this idealised realism, beyond simply pleasing the eye. Dutch society at the time was a highly moral one, largely dominated by Calvinist religious values. Women had a clearly defined role and they were expected to run a calm, dignified and orderly household. Any painting of a woman at home inevitably carried a message—order, good; disorder, bad.
Yet the Dutch were not po-faced and they did not, apparently, like to be lectured. Moral messages were delivered in different ways. De Hooch’s contemporary, Jan Steen, for example, used humour to underline a woman’s duty at home. He was one of the great comic painters of the time, a genius at depicting the consequences of domestic laziness, profligacy or over-indulgence. He would show, for instance, a housewife dozing in her kitchen, often after indulging in tobacco or wine, and render it as a scene of topsy-turvy chaos, her children, household and perhaps even her husband running riot as she slept.
De Hooch takes an entirely different approach. He makes the concept of domestic virtue seem seductive. In The Mother, the floor tiles are worked to a high sheen and the glow of the burnished brass warming pan and pewter candleholder speaks
His paintings mark a revolutionary new awareness of women’s everyday lives