Pieter de Hooch: The Courtyard of a House in Delft
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| Pieter de Hooch, Courtyard of a House in Delft, National Gallery, London. |
The Courtyard of a House in Delft - one of the best-loved paintings of Pieter de Hooch (1629-84) - is first heard of in 1810, when it formed part of a private collection of pictures sold at auction in Amsterdam. The sale catalogue describes the painting as follows:
"P. de Hooch. In a courtyard we see a woman and a child coming down some stone steps, and to the side in a passage or walkway another woman going towards a second open space" (McLaren).
The painting bears a signature and a date on a stone at the bottom of the archway: "PDH 1658". The painting passed through the hands of several private owners and was eventually bought by the National Gallery in 1871. With its celebration of bourgeois values and home life, this is just the kind of picture the Victorians would have loved.
The painting still has popular appeal and is well-known through reproductions. This charming domestic scene is depicted with such loving attention to detail that we feel we could step inside the world of the painting.
Art historians who have written about this painting have tended to concentrate on its formal and stylistic qualities, perhaps to the neglect of its subject matter. The convincing representation of three-dimensional space is, indeed, its most immediate and striking quality. Peter Sutton, who has written a book on De Hooch, points out that the painters of Delft were especially interested in creating "realism" through perspective (Sutton 18). This can be seen not only in the work of De Hooch but also in the paintings of Carel Fabritius, Johannes Vermeer, Emanuel de Witte, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and other Delft artists. What needs further investigation by art historians is the question of why it was in Delft rather than, say, Amsterdam or Haarlem, that the exploration of perspective was so important to artists.
There are several ways of creating the illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat picture surface. One method is through the use of light and shadow. De Hooch does not make much use of this in his Courtyard painting, although there are some shadows inside the house. Another method is to make things further away seem smaller in size, and this De Hooch uses to great effect in his view through the passage - the lady standing inside is only half the size of the lady in the courtyard. This kind of view through an open door into another room or space is a hallmark of De Hooch, found in many of his paintings. Yet another means of creating pictorial space - perhaps the most important one of all - is to create perspective lines converging on a vanishing point. The stones of the courtyard help to perform this function, a function performed by the floor tiles in interior scenes by De Hooch. None of these observations here is particularly original and any account of De Hooch is likely to discuss his use of perspective.
If, however, we leave aside the style of the painting and start to ask questions about its content, we find that we are in less well-charted territory. What does the painting depict? What is happening in the painting? What is it about?
The architectural setting deserves our first consideration. In Dutch houses of this period, the main entrance was usually kept locked and people entered via a side entrance, often into a courtyard such as this one. That is one reason why the courtyard had to be cleaned so thoroughly - because it would be seen by visitors. A door is open into the wall of the courtyard, but where does it lead to? It could lead to a walled garden, or perhaps it is the entrance to a shed or storeroom with a flat roof. The lady seems to have opened the door and is holding in her hand some kind of flat dish, perhaps containing something for the evening meal. The other lady, standing in the passage, is looking through a door and out of the house - but what is she looking at? It could be towards another part of the same house, but is more probably the adjacent house. If that is the case, could she be spying on her neighbours? Such questions may seem too frivolous and speculative, but they does address the content of the painting and are too often ignored in standard art historical accounts.
On the wall above the archway is a stone tablet with the following inscription in old Dutch:
"This is St. Jerome's vale, if you wish to retire to patience and meekness, for we must first descend if we wish to be raised. 1614"
It is known that this is an inscription from an actual tablet, found in a cloister in Delft. The fact that De Hooch has transplanted it into his painting shows that there is considerable artistic licence at work here. The art historian Madlyn Millner Kahr makes the obvious but necessary point that the inscription "would be an appropriate epigraph not only for this painting but for many of De Hooch's works, which pay reverent tribute to the humble and patient" (Kahr 265). But this interpretation loses some of its credibility when we discover that De Hooch introduced the same stone inscription into another courtyard scene - Figures Drinking in a Courtyard - and that this other painting shows a maidservant drinking with two men, while a little girl, somewhat neglected, plays with a puppy. How can the inscription have relevance to the figures in both paintings? A more general point that can be made is that, even today, the Dutch have a fondness for moralising inscriptions. In Dutch houses and hotels one sometimes finds plaques with verses, exhorting one to value friendship, for example, or to make good use of time. The owner of De Hooch's painting would have had such a message within the picture, as a kind of added extra.
If we now turn to what is happening in De Hooch's painting, we see that it is partly about housework. The floor of the passage and the stones of the courtyard have been swept and scrubbed until not a speck of dirt remains. A bucket and a broom are lying on the ground, symbols of the Dutch passion for house cleaning. The historian Paul Zumthor tells us that "some households used thirty or forty buckets of water a day simply for cleaning purposes" (Zumthor 139). The doors and shutters have been thrown open to let fresh air circulate throughout the house. The time of year may seem to be Autumn, because the leaves have turned brown, but on closer examination the leaves appear strangely pale and faded, like ghosts. It is probable that they were originally bright green, but that De Hooch has used an unstable green pigment and that his leaves have lost their colour (McLaren 199-200). The time is probably a sunny day in Spring or Summer - too nice a day to be stuck at home doing housework. The lady in the passage - who is wearing an apron - is gazing out of the house, and the small patch of sky also hints, perhaps, at a longing to escape the claustrophobic world of the home, if only for an afternoon. The painting is "realistic" and yet, at the same time, idealistic, because it depicts a home of immaculate cleanliness. In Dutch, the word "schoon" means both "clean" and "beautiful". Another favourite word is "netjes", meaning "neat" and "tidy". Such a painting of house cleaning, hung on the wall, would - even without the conscious intention - have served to reinforce male dominance in society. It was thought to be man's role to go out into the world and woman's to stay at home and do the housework. This is one of the themes in the verses of Joseph Cats, a seventeenth-century Dutch moralist. It was said that every household had a coy of Cats and a copy of the Bible (Schama).
This brings us to the question of De Hooch's patrons. What kind of customer bought his paintings? The economist John Montias - who has made a special study of the art market in seventeenth-century Delft - confirms that Dutch artists painted with an eye to a particular type of buyer, but did not usually undertake commissions for individual patrons - except for portraits. Even quite humble households would often have possessed a few pictures, but fine paintings like those of De Hooch were outside the price range of most people. They were bought by the affluent Calvinist middle classes who dominated the town of Delft - the same kind of people depicted in so many of De Hooch's paintings.
The roles of people in society is clearly an important subject in De Hooch's work, and this will help us in interpreting The Courtyard of a House in Delft. The painting depicts two adult women and a little girl - but who are they? Madlyn Millner Kahr thinks that the lady holding hands with the little girl is "the mother (or nurse?)" of the girl (Kahr 265). If we study the costumes of the figures, we discover that this lady is in actual fact the nurse - and not the mother - of the little girl. She is wearing the standard dress of a maidservant: a white neckerchief, a coif (hat), and a coarsely woven skirt. She appears to be wearing a a thick over-skirt bunched up around her waist, which could, perhaps, have been let down like an apron when she had dirty work to do. The little girl is simply dressed, but her garments appear to be made of finer material and she has longer hair. Her mother, the mistress of the house, is standing in the passage. She is wearing a fashionable black velvet jacket. These were sometimes edged with fur. A seventeenth-century person would have recognised immediately the social distinction between these figures. The fact that we, today, have difficulty doing this tells us something about the society of seventeenth-century Holland, which was more egalitarian than any other country in Europe.
The presentation of the maidservant in The Courtyard of a House in Delft is, nevertheless, an idealised image. Servants were treated better in Holland than anywhere else in Europe, but there is still plenty of evidence of conflict between them and their employers. They could, for example, be sent to prison for stealing the family's spoons (Schama 460). There are several paintings on the theme of "the idle servant", including one by Nicolaes Maes in the National Gallery. It depicts a maidservant who has fallen asleep in the middle of her duties, with a pile of dirty dishes on the floor.
The historian Simon Schama tells us that "there was no literature popular or polite (and no art either), featuring the exemplary servant" (Schama 460). But is not the maidservant in The Courtyard of a House in Delft an exemplary servant? She is the central figure in the painting. She is modestly dressed, takes care of the little girl, and sweeps the courtyard. De Hooch has given us a picture of the industrious servant to set against pictures of the idle servant.
The maid holding hands with the little girl is a very moving image, placed right in the centre of the painting. It is set against a background of an arbour, where plants are being trained to grow around sticks. Could there be the suggestion that the maid nurtures the little girl in the way that she nurtures the plants? That is probably too fanciful a suggestion, but there may well be symbolism in the intertwining branches just behind the two figures, suggesting the love the maid and the child have for each other. They look towards one another with affection. The idea that there could be a close bond of love between them is also supported by historical evidence from the period:
" . . . an old female servant, who had been with the family a long time and was on intimate terms with its members, would often look after the slightly older children. She dressed them, washed them and, making use of her repertoire of children's folklore, sang them lullabies and told them fairy stories" (Zumthor 98).
That is surely the kind of relationship that is depicted in The Courtyard of a House in Delft. The maid seems to be in her thirties and will probably never marry, but the love of the little girl perhaps helps to compensate her for the fact that she has no children of her own. The painting has always been renowned for its visual beauty, for the fact that it gives us a wonderful view of a courtyard in old Delft. But it also appeals to the emotions; for the love between the maidservant and the little girl transfigures this painting into an enduring image of human love.
Works Cited
Cunningham, Phillis, Costume of Household Servants from the Middle Ages to 1900, London: A & C Black, 1974
Kahr, Madlyn Millner, Dutch Painting in the Seventeenth Century, New York: Harper & Row, 1978
McLaren, Neil, and Christopher Brown, The Dutch School 1600-1900 (catalogue of National Gallery paintings), 2 vols., London: National Gallery, 1991
Montias, John Michael, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982
Schama, Simon, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, London: Fontana Press, 1987
Sutton, Peter C., Pieter de Hooch, Oxford: Phaidon, 1980
Zumthor, Paul, Daily Life in Rembrandt's Holland, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1962
Art historians who have written about this painting have tended to concentrate on its formal and stylistic qualities, perhaps to the neglect of its subject matter. The convincing representation of three-dimensional space is, indeed, its most immediate and striking quality. Peter Sutton, who has written a book on De Hooch, points out that the painters of Delft were especially interested in creating "realism" through perspective (Sutton 18). This can be seen not only in the work of De Hooch but also in the paintings of Carel Fabritius, Johannes Vermeer, Emanuel de Witte, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and other Delft artists. What needs further investigation by art historians is the question of why it was in Delft rather than, say, Amsterdam or Haarlem, that the exploration of perspective was so important to artists.
There are several ways of creating the illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat picture surface. One method is through the use of light and shadow. De Hooch does not make much use of this in his Courtyard painting, although there are some shadows inside the house. Another method is to make things further away seem smaller in size, and this De Hooch uses to great effect in his view through the passage - the lady standing inside is only half the size of the lady in the courtyard. This kind of view through an open door into another room or space is a hallmark of De Hooch, found in many of his paintings. Yet another means of creating pictorial space - perhaps the most important one of all - is to create perspective lines converging on a vanishing point. The stones of the courtyard help to perform this function, a function performed by the floor tiles in interior scenes by De Hooch. None of these observations here is particularly original and any account of De Hooch is likely to discuss his use of perspective.
If, however, we leave aside the style of the painting and start to ask questions about its content, we find that we are in less well-charted territory. What does the painting depict? What is happening in the painting? What is it about?
The architectural setting deserves our first consideration. In Dutch houses of this period, the main entrance was usually kept locked and people entered via a side entrance, often into a courtyard such as this one. That is one reason why the courtyard had to be cleaned so thoroughly - because it would be seen by visitors. A door is open into the wall of the courtyard, but where does it lead to? It could lead to a walled garden, or perhaps it is the entrance to a shed or storeroom with a flat roof. The lady seems to have opened the door and is holding in her hand some kind of flat dish, perhaps containing something for the evening meal. The other lady, standing in the passage, is looking through a door and out of the house - but what is she looking at? It could be towards another part of the same house, but is more probably the adjacent house. If that is the case, could she be spying on her neighbours? Such questions may seem too frivolous and speculative, but they does address the content of the painting and are too often ignored in standard art historical accounts.
On the wall above the archway is a stone tablet with the following inscription in old Dutch:
"This is St. Jerome's vale, if you wish to retire to patience and meekness, for we must first descend if we wish to be raised. 1614"
It is known that this is an inscription from an actual tablet, found in a cloister in Delft. The fact that De Hooch has transplanted it into his painting shows that there is considerable artistic licence at work here. The art historian Madlyn Millner Kahr makes the obvious but necessary point that the inscription "would be an appropriate epigraph not only for this painting but for many of De Hooch's works, which pay reverent tribute to the humble and patient" (Kahr 265). But this interpretation loses some of its credibility when we discover that De Hooch introduced the same stone inscription into another courtyard scene - Figures Drinking in a Courtyard - and that this other painting shows a maidservant drinking with two men, while a little girl, somewhat neglected, plays with a puppy. How can the inscription have relevance to the figures in both paintings? A more general point that can be made is that, even today, the Dutch have a fondness for moralising inscriptions. In Dutch houses and hotels one sometimes finds plaques with verses, exhorting one to value friendship, for example, or to make good use of time. The owner of De Hooch's painting would have had such a message within the picture, as a kind of added extra.
If we now turn to what is happening in De Hooch's painting, we see that it is partly about housework. The floor of the passage and the stones of the courtyard have been swept and scrubbed until not a speck of dirt remains. A bucket and a broom are lying on the ground, symbols of the Dutch passion for house cleaning. The historian Paul Zumthor tells us that "some households used thirty or forty buckets of water a day simply for cleaning purposes" (Zumthor 139). The doors and shutters have been thrown open to let fresh air circulate throughout the house. The time of year may seem to be Autumn, because the leaves have turned brown, but on closer examination the leaves appear strangely pale and faded, like ghosts. It is probable that they were originally bright green, but that De Hooch has used an unstable green pigment and that his leaves have lost their colour (McLaren 199-200). The time is probably a sunny day in Spring or Summer - too nice a day to be stuck at home doing housework. The lady in the passage - who is wearing an apron - is gazing out of the house, and the small patch of sky also hints, perhaps, at a longing to escape the claustrophobic world of the home, if only for an afternoon. The painting is "realistic" and yet, at the same time, idealistic, because it depicts a home of immaculate cleanliness. In Dutch, the word "schoon" means both "clean" and "beautiful". Another favourite word is "netjes", meaning "neat" and "tidy". Such a painting of house cleaning, hung on the wall, would - even without the conscious intention - have served to reinforce male dominance in society. It was thought to be man's role to go out into the world and woman's to stay at home and do the housework. This is one of the themes in the verses of Joseph Cats, a seventeenth-century Dutch moralist. It was said that every household had a coy of Cats and a copy of the Bible (Schama).
This brings us to the question of De Hooch's patrons. What kind of customer bought his paintings? The economist John Montias - who has made a special study of the art market in seventeenth-century Delft - confirms that Dutch artists painted with an eye to a particular type of buyer, but did not usually undertake commissions for individual patrons - except for portraits. Even quite humble households would often have possessed a few pictures, but fine paintings like those of De Hooch were outside the price range of most people. They were bought by the affluent Calvinist middle classes who dominated the town of Delft - the same kind of people depicted in so many of De Hooch's paintings.
The roles of people in society is clearly an important subject in De Hooch's work, and this will help us in interpreting The Courtyard of a House in Delft. The painting depicts two adult women and a little girl - but who are they? Madlyn Millner Kahr thinks that the lady holding hands with the little girl is "the mother (or nurse?)" of the girl (Kahr 265). If we study the costumes of the figures, we discover that this lady is in actual fact the nurse - and not the mother - of the little girl. She is wearing the standard dress of a maidservant: a white neckerchief, a coif (hat), and a coarsely woven skirt. She appears to be wearing a a thick over-skirt bunched up around her waist, which could, perhaps, have been let down like an apron when she had dirty work to do. The little girl is simply dressed, but her garments appear to be made of finer material and she has longer hair. Her mother, the mistress of the house, is standing in the passage. She is wearing a fashionable black velvet jacket. These were sometimes edged with fur. A seventeenth-century person would have recognised immediately the social distinction between these figures. The fact that we, today, have difficulty doing this tells us something about the society of seventeenth-century Holland, which was more egalitarian than any other country in Europe.
The presentation of the maidservant in The Courtyard of a House in Delft is, nevertheless, an idealised image. Servants were treated better in Holland than anywhere else in Europe, but there is still plenty of evidence of conflict between them and their employers. They could, for example, be sent to prison for stealing the family's spoons (Schama 460). There are several paintings on the theme of "the idle servant", including one by Nicolaes Maes in the National Gallery. It depicts a maidservant who has fallen asleep in the middle of her duties, with a pile of dirty dishes on the floor.
The historian Simon Schama tells us that "there was no literature popular or polite (and no art either), featuring the exemplary servant" (Schama 460). But is not the maidservant in The Courtyard of a House in Delft an exemplary servant? She is the central figure in the painting. She is modestly dressed, takes care of the little girl, and sweeps the courtyard. De Hooch has given us a picture of the industrious servant to set against pictures of the idle servant.
The maid holding hands with the little girl is a very moving image, placed right in the centre of the painting. It is set against a background of an arbour, where plants are being trained to grow around sticks. Could there be the suggestion that the maid nurtures the little girl in the way that she nurtures the plants? That is probably too fanciful a suggestion, but there may well be symbolism in the intertwining branches just behind the two figures, suggesting the love the maid and the child have for each other. They look towards one another with affection. The idea that there could be a close bond of love between them is also supported by historical evidence from the period:
" . . . an old female servant, who had been with the family a long time and was on intimate terms with its members, would often look after the slightly older children. She dressed them, washed them and, making use of her repertoire of children's folklore, sang them lullabies and told them fairy stories" (Zumthor 98).
That is surely the kind of relationship that is depicted in The Courtyard of a House in Delft. The maid seems to be in her thirties and will probably never marry, but the love of the little girl perhaps helps to compensate her for the fact that she has no children of her own. The painting has always been renowned for its visual beauty, for the fact that it gives us a wonderful view of a courtyard in old Delft. But it also appeals to the emotions; for the love between the maidservant and the little girl transfigures this painting into an enduring image of human love.
Works Cited
Cunningham, Phillis, Costume of Household Servants from the Middle Ages to 1900, London: A & C Black, 1974
Kahr, Madlyn Millner, Dutch Painting in the Seventeenth Century, New York: Harper & Row, 1978
McLaren, Neil, and Christopher Brown, The Dutch School 1600-1900 (catalogue of National Gallery paintings), 2 vols., London: National Gallery, 1991
Montias, John Michael, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982
Schama, Simon, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, London: Fontana Press, 1987
Sutton, Peter C., Pieter de Hooch, Oxford: Phaidon, 1980
Zumthor, Paul, Daily Life in Rembrandt's Holland, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1962
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