HOOCH, Pieter de
(b. 1629, Rotterdam, d. 1684, Amsterdam)

Woman Reading a Letter

1664
Oil on canvas, 55 x 55 cm
Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest

Pieter de Hooch depicts for us incidents in the daily lives of women at home with their children: the mother watching over the cradle, serving her family at table, reading a letter or working in her kitchen. Some of his paintings show guests arriving in a spotlessly clean room or courtyard, taking a glass of wine, listening to music or conversing together. The keynote of every single picture is an intimate simplicity; the painter conducts us into a calm and quiet world, both clean and orderly, inhabited by the well-to-do. Patrons, whose preference was for something livelier, for gay and colourful peasant scenes, bought pictures by the Ostades, Jan Steen or Jan Miense Molenaer, but de Hooch was popular in the narrower circle of those who appreciated his distinctive approach and delicacy of execution. The magic of his works lies not so much in his subjects as in the means by which he interpreted them: the lucid and balanced composition, the feeling of space and the warm glow of his colours.

The sunlight streaming through the window suggests early afternoon. Reflected light and soft shadows are intermingled on the oriental rug spread over the table, the leather-backed chairs, the curtain and the lead-framed window-panes. It seems as if the quiet would be hardly broken by any sounds from far or near. The act of reading by the young woman sitting in a corner of the room is just as objectively portrayed. The atmosphere of intimacy is absolute, emanating alike from the lady and the objects included in the composition.