Word: de
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Until De Hooch goes to Amsterdam, the work is all plain, in surface, substance and gesture. There's scarcely a hint of theatricality in the way his Delft models look. The figures in A Woman Drinking with Two Men, and a Serving Woman, circa 1658, are circumspect and static. True, the man on the left seems to be mimicking a violin player with two clay pipes, but it would be hard to imagine a more decorous drinking party, and the glass of wine the woman raises is more like a chalice than an attribute of Bacchus, let alone Venus. Their...
...much of a realist was he? In De Hooch's world every brick is in place--he was, as a matter of fact, the son of a master bricklayer--but that place may not have been in a real structure. The show contains two paintings of the "same" scene, a courtyard in Delft, from 1658, featuring a brick archway with an inscribed tablet and a round window above it, and a little arbor to the right. Except that in the second version the arbor isn't an arbor but a shed; and the slice of street seen through the archway...
...De Hooch's painting changed after his move to Amsterdam. He was working for a richer and posher clientele--not that they made him rich. The plain stuff of his interiors gives way to more sumptuous surfaces: marble, Turkish carpets and gilded walls of embossed leather, all of which he painted with virtuosity. The people are dressed to the nines. The idea that De Hooch sold out to them, and to their way of life, thus sending his art into decadence, was widespread once. It isn't borne out by the pictures themselves. A strangely moody image from...
Call it the sidekick theory of history: the idea that behind every famous individual was an unsung, exceptional assistant whose aid and support guaranteed his or her chief's success. In the case of Charles Darwin, the invaluable aide-de-camp may have been one Syms Covington, an obscure British sailor who, though he's barely mentioned in Darwin's writings, toiled at his side throughout his early career, bagging the vast array of specimens upon which Darwin founded his theory of natural selection. Now, in Australian novelist Roger McDonald's Mr. Darwin's Shooter (Atlantic Monthly Press; 365 pages...
...which would open onto large common areas. Fruits and vegetables would grow there, using water collected by natural drainage (the land would be contoured to capture most rainwater, with excess flowing into ditches and ponds rather than concrete storm sewers). The streets would be narrow and end in cul-de-sacs. Winding walkways would connect the homes to a small courtyard of offices, reinforcing the theme of a community built for people, not cars...