Project 2 :17th-century Artist

Pieter de Hooch
• Dutch painter
• Mainly depicted highly ordered interiors with domestic themes and merry companies and pioneering the depiction of genre scenes set in a sunlit courtyard.
• The hallmarks of his art are an unequalled responsiveness to subtle effects of daylight, and views to adjoining spaces, either through a doorway or a window, offering spatial as well as psychological release.
• The subjects of de Hooch’s mature period were more conventional than their treatment.
• De Hooch’s celebration of domesticity is no doubt related to the sanctity and centrality of the home in Dutch society.
• De Hooch’s orderly spaces perfectly complemented this new celebration of domesticity, the walls and their light-filled windows and doorways creating a comforting framework for chores and nurturance.
• Iconographic studies of Dutch genre paintings have often revealed ‘hidden meanings’, or what Erwin Panofsky called ‘disguised symbolism’, in outwardly naturalistic scenes. De Hooch did not share the metaphorical and highly moralizing approach of some of his contemporaries.
• The meanings of his art usually arise from the associations of the subjects depicted, such as his images of domestic virtue, rather than through covertly encoded ideas.
• When he introduced symbols, they usually functioned as supplementary footnotes rather than the central theme of his works of art.
Bibliography
C. Hofstede de Groot: Catalogue of Dutch Painters, i (London, 1908), pp. 471–570
W. R. Valentiner: Pieter de Hooch, Klass. Kst. Gesamtausgaben, xxxv (Stuttgart, 1929)
F. W. S. van Thienen: Pieter de Hoogh, Palet Series, v (Amsterdam, n.d. [c. 1945])