Word: 17th
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...central figure in the propaganda battle is Zheng Chenggong, traditionally known to Westerners as Koxinga, the mentally unhinged son of a pirate, now lauded on the mainland as a "nationalist hero." After Manchu "barbarians" breached the Great Wall to establish the Qing dynasty in the 17th century, Zheng led his coastal forces in resistance before fleeing in 1661 to Taiwan, then a scarcely populated outpost supporting some Dutch traders and a small garrison, which he defeated. Shortly after, Zheng ordered his officers to execute his own son over a love affair with a nurse; they refused, so the hero killed...
...beautiful and touching example is De Hooch's Mother and Child with Its Head in Her Lap, circa 1658-60. The little girl kneeling down in that shadowed interior might be engaged in prayer, but in fact she is submitting to one of the commonest hygienic rituals of 17th century childhood --her attentive mother picking through her hair for lice...
...Vermeer--this time at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Curated by a team of scholars led by Walter Liedtke, the Met's curator of European paintings, "Vermeer and the Delft School" sets itself the task of filling in Vermeer's immediate cultural background. In the 17th century the Dutch city of Delft was an art center, though not a big one. Its population at mid-century was only about 25,000. It had flourishing trade (much of it luxury goods, like the popular blue-glazed pottery that still bears the city's name), a solid class...
...move on. Towns in Holland were a lot closer together and rather more connected than in Italy or France. Artists circulated with more ease among them, so firmly shaped local "schools" are not so easy to find. But if there was one artist totally identified with Delft in the 17th century, it was Vermeer--the only great painter to be born there, live there and (in 1675, at the early age of 43) be buried there...
...idea of "Vermeer and the Delft School" is a harmless red herring, a pretext for looking at Vermeer and a few lesser artists who happened to be around in the same town at the same time. There was no distinctive Delft school. In the 17th century the place harbored only one artist whose talents approached Vermeer's--the slightly older Pieter de Hooch (1629-84), who was originally from Rotterdam but worked in Delft for about five years in the 1650s. Vermeer and De Hooch had several things in common, the main one being that nothing at all is known...