In the early 1660s, Pieter de Hooch was living in an area of what we would now call urban overspill surrounding the commercial boom town of Amsterdam. It wasn’t the best of neighbourhoods. Nearby was a little street nicknamed ‘whorehouse alley’ (het hoerenpad). Tanners plied their trade thereabouts, which involved soaking hides in urine. But smells and sounds are not necessarily recorded in pictures, and in this 17th-century version of affordable housing, De Hooch painted images of utter domestic tranquillity.
One such picture, ‘A Mother’s Duty’ (c.1658–60), is among the star exhibits in a delightful little exhibition of De Hooch’s work at the Museum Prinsenhof, Delft. Admittedly, the alternative name, ‘A Mother Delousing her Child’s Hair’, strikes a more utilitarian note. But the painting is not really about the woman and the child — who may well be De Hooch’s wife, Jannetje, and one of their children — and their chore.
The principle subject is light. Or rather, as the French critic Théophile Thoré noted a century and a half ago, ‘three successive planes of different light’. The mother and child are in a shadowy inner room, with a simple bed built into one wall. Beyond that we can see into another small space, from which a half-open door leads into the sunny day outside. The air might have been laden with tannery stench, but it looks seraphically calm.
De Hooch distinguishes brilliantly between the soft shadows dappling the outer door, and the way the light gleams on varnished inner woodwork. Just inside the door there is a pool of sunlight on the floor, and elsewhere an occasional sparkle on the raised edge of one of the red tiles. It is almost like a sermon, the theme of which is that the beauties of the universe can be observed just as well in a low-rent area as in an expensive one — possibly better.
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