Pieter de Hooch
The painter of open doors.
Pieter de Hooch painted courtyards and interiors in Delft where you see room after room and out through doorways. He influenced Vermeer.
Pieter de Hooch was baptised in Rotterdam in December 1629. His father was a bricklayer and his mother a midwife. According to an early biography he studied with the landscape painter Nicolaes Berchem in Haarlem. In the early 1650s he moved to Delft, where for a time he was employed by a linen merchant, both as a servant and as a painter. In 1654 he married, and the following year he became a member of the painters' guild in Delft.
His best works were made during his years in Delft in the late 1650s. He painted courtyards and homes where you see room after room, out through open doors and windows towards a sunlit street or garden. The Courtyard of a House in Delft of 1658 in the National Gallery in London shows a woman and a child in a brick courtyard, with a passage leading out to the street. In The Linen Cupboard of 1663 in the Rijksmuseum, painted after his move to Amsterdam, two women put folded sheets into a large cupboard.
De Hooch's pictures are calm and orderly. He was very precise with perspective and geometric floor patterns, and he used daylight that streams in and settles softly over walls and floors. His subjects are often household tasks: women looking after children, cleaning or talking to a maidservant. They reflect an ideal of the orderly and virtuous home.
Around 1660–61 he moved to Amsterdam. There he painted richer interiors for a wealthier clientele, but these are usually considered to be of lower quality. He died in Amsterdam in 1684, and there are records suggesting that he died in an asylum.
De Hooch and Vermeer were active in Delft at the same time, and their subjects are similar. It is likely that they influenced each other, but who influenced whom more is debated. De Hooch is now regarded as one of the foremost interior painters of the Dutch Golden Age.