Word: hooches
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Dutch wives and servants were forever sweeping, swabbing, scouring and polishing, re-enacting through drudgery the holiness of Martha in the house of Mary. Practices of hygiene got raised to the level of devotional acts. A marvelous example in De Hooch is A Mother and Child with Its Head in Her Lap, circa 1658-60. The child kneels submissively with her face down. The mother, absorbed in her task, is picking lice from her hair. From this ordinary domestic event, De Hooch creates an extraordinarily tender image of care and even sanctity...
...this narrative isn't the whole of the picture by any means. De Hooch was a master of spatial composition. In his pictures you are never entirely inside or wholly outside. His rooms aren't closed, artificially lit boxes but part of a continuity between the inner and outer worlds, revealing the truth of both under the benison of natural light. In this painting the rectangles of the brown room with its wide wallboards and alcove bed open backward into stages of increasing light. The window casts a bright lozenge of sun on the worn tiles of the floor beyond...
...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...
...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...