The beauties of the universe are revealed in the paintings of Pieter de Hooch

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.