Word: delft
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pooch) was the greatest Dutch genre artist of the 17th century. Very little is known about his life. He was born in Rotterdam in 1629. He learned painting by apprenticeship there, probably to Nicolaes Berchem. By 1655 his name shows up on the rolls of the artists' guild in Delft. There he must have known the slightly younger Johannes Vermeer. Five years later, he was working in Amsterdam. He married and had seven children. None of his letters survive, and no drawings either. In 1684 he died in a madhouse. Whatever his affliction may have been, it left no interpretable...
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...
...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 is different...
...Vermeer's images. Like Piero della Francesca, Vermeer was a highly inexpressive artist. He didn't even paint a self-portrait, as far as anyone knows. You come out of the exhibit knowing almost as little about Vermeer the man as when you went in. Biography, faint: Lived in Delft, a backwater. Son of a silkworker. A Papist in a Calvinist town. Quite successful nonetheless. Married Catharina Bolnes, about whom equally little is recorded. One of the few sure facts is that he had 11 children, all of whom faced destitution after he died in 1675, at the depth...
...darks shine. The late 17th century in Holland was an age of the eye: optics was a ruling scientific interest, and the telescope and microscope were opening tracts of nature that up till then had been below or beyond normal sight. As an aid to painting his View of Delft, Vermeer probably used the camera obscura--a box with a lens that captures the image of a scene on ground glass. It may be that the circles of confusion--the luminous spots caused by imperfections of the lens--gave him the idea for his poignant highlights, the liquid white dots...