Word: hooches
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Next only to Vermeer, De Hooch (rhymes with broke, not 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...
...visionary homebody, less mysterious and abstract than Vermeer but vastly more refined than his predecessors, those Dutch painters of grinning drunks, gamblers and bottom pinchers in brown taverns. De Hooch worked in this mode for a while, but his maturity as an artist began with rejecting it. Instead, he focused on home and hearth, sometimes with a bit of boozing--in Holland beer was held to be good even for small children--but always warmly idealized. What he idealized was domesticity and nurture, set in precise constructions of space, bathed in subtle transitions of light...
...extent that De Hooch made allegories of virtue at all, he certainly didn't try to shove them down the viewer's throat. His morality was all sympathy; he wasn't in any direct way a preacher. But in a time and place that put the strongest emphasis on the idea of the ordered, tranquil family as the basis of a just society, his visions of domesticity had a distinct symbolic point. Disorder, in the real world outside or the formal one inside his paintings, repelled him. Everything in his interiors is swept, garnished. De Hooch epitomizes the Dutch obsession...
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...