Pieter de Hooch, an important genre painter of interior domestic
scenes, was born on the outskirts of Rotterdam, the son of a village
butcher who fancied himself a painter. De Hooch was a pupil of Berchem in
Haarlem until the age of twenty-three, when he became "painter and lackey"
to a wealthy and eccentric Delft merchant. Delft was the city of the
artist's greatest happiness and finest work; there he married the daughter
of a master faience-maker and knew both Fabritius, Rembrandt's best pupil, and
Vermeer.
His works show the influence of Berchem in the boxlike construction that
his teacher borrowed from Claude Lorrain; from Fabritius he learned an elaborate use of perspective;
and from Vermeer, he learned the use of light, that in de Hooch's work is
golden rather than silvery. De Hooch's interiors are softly warm in color
and quiet in atmosphere. Space in his paintings is handled in definite
planes divided by walls and doors, receding in perspective and variously
lit through windows on different levels. He was particularly skilled in
painting the glow of filtered sunshine. De Hooch was deeply distressed
when his wife died in 1667, and he moved to Amsterdam, where he began to
paint fashionable scenes of the more sophisticated, affluent society in
the larger city. Thus, as many other Dutch painters had done, de Hooch
ceded to popular demand in order to earn a livelihood. De Hooch's
straightforward style and unassuming temperament did not lend themselves
to the new subjects (which he continued to paint until his death at an
unknown date after 1688), and they are less satisfying than the
middle-class interiors of his life in Delft.