Pieter de Hooch

Pieter de Hooch (1629–1684), whose name also appears in older sources as Pieter de Hoogh, was born in Rotterdam and did his finest work in Delft in the late 1650s, the same city and the same years as Vermeer. His subject was not really the people in his pictures. It was the space they stand in: a tiled courtyard, an open door, a second door beyond it, and daylight travelling through the whole sequence to land on a far wall.

That construction is what makes him worth looking at slowly. Where Vermeer compresses a room to a single figure at a single window, de Hooch opens it outward and lets you see through to a street, a canal, or a sunlit yard, so the picture keeps receding past its ostensible subject. His Amsterdam years after about 1661 brought grander interiors and a looser touch, and the biography ends badly: he was recorded in the city's asylum, where he died in 1684. No self-portrait by him is known.

His surviving output is small and widely dispersed, with major works in the Rijksmuseum, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, whose four holdings include A Dutch Courtyard and The Bedroom, both painted at the peak of the Delft period.