Delft's Other Master -- Pieter de Hooch

Think of Delft, and you think, inevitably, of one artist: Johannes Vermeer. But in the middle of the 17th century, Vermeer wasn't the only painter from this city in southern Holland set for a particular place in art history. 

Vermeer's enigmatic genre scenes are incomparable, but one of his fellow members of the Delft artists' guild was to produce some of the most characteristic pictures of the Dutch Golden Age: images of domesticity that almost sum up the period. His name was Pieter de Hooch, and this autumn and winter he's getting the attention he deserves in a show at the Museum Prinsenhof in Delft. 

We have to admit to a bias towards Golden Age painting, but Pieter de Hooch in Delft: From the Shadow of Vermeer is the best exhibition we've seen in 2019. It's not big, but it's beautifully put together and incredibly informative. And astonishingly, this is the first time de Hooch has ever had an exhibition devoted to him in the Netherlands. 

De Hooch was the master of intimate interiors and surprisingly intimate exteriors too, courtyards round the backs of houses, with doorways opening through to give you glimpses of rooms or spaces beyond, possibly a canal, with the towers of Delft's churches and town hall visible in the background. He was interested in perspectives, surfaces, tiles, brickwork, textures, everyday activities. 

Take this Woman and a Child in a Bleaching Ground in Delft. It's full of lovingly crafted detail, the child with its toy horse looking on curiously as its mother lays out linen on the grass to whiten in the sun. Distant figures lead the view down alleyways and through doorways. Every roof tile, every brick so precisely delineated. De Hooch knew his brickwork; he was the son of a bricklayer. 

All true to life, then, but not actually a true view of Delft. De Hooch put things together to fit, to create an atmosphere. The location he used as a basis for this painting has been worked out -- it's just outside the museum, in fact -- but that spot was unlikely to have been used as a bleaching ground, and you can't actually see the tower of the far church -- the Nieuwe Kerk -- from there. 

This sort of view was something new in Dutch art in the late 1650s, something groundbreaking. There were a lot of professional artists in the Netherlands, catering for a burgeoning middle class who liked to put paintings on their walls. When de Hooch arrived in Delft from Rotterdam a few years earlier, he made competent but not terribly exciting pictures of off-duty soldiers, a popular genre known as guardroom scenes. If he'd carried on, nobody would have devoted a solo show to him today. 

These courtyard scenes convey feelings of prosperity, household happiness, tranquillity. They're so cleverly constructed to draw the viewer in, to draw the eye through. That view through doors and gateways is de Hooch's trademark. The people in his paintings are, in general, just props, in contrast to Vermeer's figures. 

At this time De Hooch wasn't a portrait painter (and sometimes you can look at some of the people in his pictures and think they look a little bit stiff, that their faces aren't quite right) but he'd obviously impressed enough people in Delft to be chosen to paint a family portrait in an informal courtyard setting. Several generations together, showing off some fine clothes, some fine shoes and fine values, and of course a Delft church tower in the background.  

Even more characteristic of the 17th-century Netherlands, though, are de Hooch's interior scenes. Mothers or servants engaged in domestic tasks, dogs and small children, patterns of tiles creating a perspective that leads the eye towards the back of the painting (he used chalked taut lengths of string to create his perspective lines), light falling subtly through windows, views into the distance. 

Unlike so many other Dutch masters, though, he's not really creating a narrative, he's creating a mood. In The Mother, the child at the back isn't part of some moral lesson, it's helping to guide you through the painting to the light outside the doorway. 

If Gerard ter Borch had painted Cardplayers in a Sunlit Room, we'd be wondering who's cheating, what's the relationship between the players, what does the arrival of the woman seen through the doorway signify, and what does the card dropped on the floor mean? With de Hooch, form usually trumps any narrative content. You're admiring arches, windows, doors, tiles, the detail of the broken pipe in the foreground.

The Card Players is one of six works dated 1658 painted by de Hooch. It's seen as a peak year in his creativity, in his rendering of light and perspective. Two years later, after almost a decade in Delft, he moved to Amsterdam, the commercial centre of Europe, much bigger, much more prosperous. He painted similar sorts of domestic scenes, but the protagonists are much better dressed, the furnishings more opulent. He had to appeal to a new clientele, but he struggled financially. Pictures such as a Portrait of a Family Playing Music lack the charm of his Delft paintings. 

This is a wonderfully assembled show. An excellent introductory video leads you on to views and maps of Delft and archive documents that illustrate de Hooch's time in Delft, including the artist's guild register that records how he left for Amsterdam with some of the 12-guilder membership fee still unpaid five years after joining. The paintings are beautifully lit and there's an excellent free audio guide and more video highlighting individual aspects of de Hooch's work as you go round the exhibition. 

The curators have clearly put a huge amount of effort in, following years of new research preparing for the show, and there are paintings from around Europe and the US. This Bedroom from Washington is hung alongside another version from Karlsruhe, with only slight differences in the details. It captures so many of de Hooch's characteristics: the subtle lighting, the perspective view through, the mother and child. 

De Hooch's paintings sold in the 19th century for increasing amounts -- with prices matching Raphael's -- but it was Vermeer who became Delft's most famous painter in the 20th. So, how much did they influence each other? In a city of 25,000 people, where they were both members of the same artist's guild, they must have been acquaintances, even if the curators hedge their bets about the subject. 

But this work by de Hooch -- Woman Weighing Gold and Silver Coins -- bears remarkable similarities to Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance. 

Both were painted in around 1664. Chicken or egg? De Hooch had already moved to Amsterdam. There's still much we don't know, even when de Hooch died, though it was 1679 or later. Did he go to the Dutch East Indies? At least we now know he didn't die in a madhouse -- that was his son, also called Pieter.

There are only 29 paintings by de Hooch in this show, but it's a thoroughly splendid exhibition. After you've been to see it, pick up a leaflet and follow the guided walk round Delft, to the buildings that de Hooch painted and the places that inspired him. Vermeer will always be there for another day.

Practicalities

Pieter de Hooch in Delft: From the Shadow of Vermeer is on at the Museum Prinsenhof in Delft until February 16. The museum is open daily from 0900 to 1700, and full-price tickets cost 17.50 euros. Book ahead with a timeslot online here. The Prinsenhof is located on Sint Agathaplein, right next to the Oude Kerk. If you're travelling from The Hague, tram 1 takes around 20 minutes and stops right outside. From Amsterdam, frequent trains to Delft take somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour (9292.nl gives you times for public transport across the Netherlands) and Delft station is 10 minutes' walk from the museum.

Images

Pieter de Hooch, Woman and a Child in a Bleaching Ground in Delft, 1657-59. © Private collection
Pieter de Hooch, The Courtyard of a House in Delft, 1658. © The National Gallery, London
Pieter de Hooch, Portrait of a Delft Family, 1657-60. © Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildende Künste, Vienna
Pieter de Hooch, The Mother, 1661-63. © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
Pieter de Hooch, Cardplayers in a Sunlit Room, 1658, Royal Collection Trust. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019
Pieter de Hooch, The Bedroom, c. 1660-62, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
Pieter de Hooch, Woman Weighing Gold and Silver Coins, c. 1664, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie