Shedding More Light on Delft

As I have mentioned numerous times in this space over the past several months of writing this blog, 0ne of my favorite painters is the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. The first time I ever saw an exhibit of his paintings was at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. I have two of his prints on the wall of my bedroom - the geographer and the astronomer. I have also read several books about him in an effort to learn more about his art and what inspired him. One such may have been one of his contemporaries in Delft.

Pieter de Hooch, often cited as a painter of domestic Dutch scenes, has a reputation that has long been associated with that of his contemporary Vermeer. When in 1765 a painting of his was offered for sale in Amsterdam, it was described as "as good as Vermeer of Delft”-and one 19th-century French critic, in reviving Vermeer’s reputation, attributed to him five paintings by de Hooch. It is true that both painters portray intimate domestic interiors of a modest scale and quiet mood, but de Hooch suffers cruelly from the comparison. His brushwork is scratchy, his colors brownish and murky, and his compositions haphazard when viewed with Vermeer’s pellucid and exquisitely rigorous canvases in mind. Compared with Vermeer, de Hooch does not draw well, let alone paint with the younger man’s serene rapture of weightless touch and opalescent color.

For Vermeer, as for very few artists prior to the Impressionists, painting is not just the method but the subject, a topic explored in such dazzling visual essays as the reflections on a brass water pitcher and basin, the shadows falling across the shallow ridges of an unscrolled map, the photographically exact yet rather freely brushed pattern of a folded and foreshortened Oriental rug, the liquid spill of a lacemaker’s red and white threads, the cool folds and dimples of a silk skirt, the delicately muted and flattened colors of a picture on a wall - a picture within a picture to tell us that this too is a picture. The science of perspective and the invention of the camera obscura opened to Vermeer, in this era of burgeoning astronomy and microscopy, a world of optical truth to which both the painter and his human subjects are, in a sense, transitory visitors, accessories to the transcendent process whereby light defines objects.

With de Hooch the topic is less the seeing than what we see - homely Dutch folk and their furniture, their rooms, the cityscape glimpsed over their shoulders. They reveal not only where de Hooch falls short of Vermeer but where he goes beyond him, providing what Vermeer in his great rarefaction does not. Children, for one thing. Though Vermeer had at least 11, not a single child appears in a painting by him, perhaps because children could not remain still long enough.

On the other hand, a high proportion of the de Hooch canvases contain children - a bit stiffly and incidentally and with an affecting tenderness and concentration. And they are painted with a tactful skill de Hooch brought rarely to human anatomy. He does not let us forget that a focus of these cozy, clean, sun-washed Dutch interiors is the nurture and protection of children; it is their pets and toys that interrupt the swept severity of the tile floors.

All these paintings - and the bulk of de Hooch’s best - come from the period when, by the spotty records, he lived in Delft. Born in Rotterdam in 1629, he learned and practiced his trade there until his marriage to a Delft woman in 1654 cemented his move to that city, a venerable and economically declining center of tapestry ateliers, breweries, and Delftware factories. This modest town of 20,000 people housed, during the 1650s, a boom in genre painting, including Vermeer. Though no records remain of interactions between them, it seems unlikely that in circles so small there were none. De Hooch, three years older, may have influenced Vermeer to turn from the large mythological subjects of his earliest canvases to smaller-scaled realism. Around 1660 de Hooch moved from Delft to the metropolis of Amsterdam, where the patronage was richer and his paintings became more elaborate and ostentatiously refined.

But while in Delft he captured qualities excluded from Vermeer’s paradise of jewellike moments. The son of a bricklayer, de Hooch gives us the textures underfoot. The floor tiles, arrestingly smoothed to a pattern of alternating black and white in Vermeer, in de Hooch paintings wear their uneven glazing, their raised edges catching the light. His bricked courtyards have the slight wave of uneven earth beneath, and his whitewashed walls bear cracks and rough patches. When de Hooch gets to Amsterdam, he exults in walls of gilt leather, whose embossed and glinting arabesques, all but overpower the rather pallidly projected merry companies.

The human figures in the Amsterdam pictures in general lack the warmth of individuality, as if he did not know them the way he did his neighbors in Delft; he visits their houses as a social inferior and is encouraged to focus on their conspicuous possessions. De Hooch’s sense of human drama is vague and elastic enough, frequent pentimenti reveal, to permit him to paint people in and out quite late in the stages of composition. Even if de Hooch did not execute these later revisions, something unresolved in his initial composition opened the way for the muddle. Some of his figures have a Magritte-like air of floating disconnection. The viewer is frequently struck by vacuously dark stretches in his canvases, whose occupants seem semi-lost in spaces too big for them.

Perhaps space is the secret topic that concerned de Hooch. If Vermeer was the much superior director of human drama, even when only one woman is on the canvas, de Hooch gives us an aspect of Delft that Vermeer, save in his two great cityscapes, reduces to a creamy light evenly streaming through a window: the outdoors. De Hooch’s sunlight is tawny, one with his orange tiles, baked bricks, and varnished cabinets. He takes us out into the paved courtyards where much of Delft’s domestic work was done; he shows us a dirt alley blanketed with laundry and depicts the makeshift wooden sheds and lattices that pieced out this city of brick and tile. Further, his interiors have long perspectives, one room opening into another where a window in turn affords a glimpse of sunlit scenery and the interplay between outdoor and indoor illumination approaches the virtuosic.

The sense of healthy interchange between outdoors and in, between leafy growths and buffed artifacts, helps to create an airy intimacy. In his Amsterdam phase, the far doorway giving onto a sunny vista became a compulsive de Hooch signature.

Two Amsterdam paintings show his indoor-outdoor fugue to exquisite, enameled effect. Such canvases, though more dryly detailed than any by Vermeer, have been lifted above the anecdotal interest of genre scenes to a plane of pure painting - “pure” for lack of a juster word to denote painting as disinterested exploration and meditation. It adds a good deal to our sense of time and of the universe.

What a curious thing, after all, genre painting is, beginning with the name - an inexpressive term, the French word for “sort” or “type,” first used in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1849 to designate paintings of ordinary life. Though examples can be found in French painting and American, the supreme examples belong to the Dutch 17th century. The emergent middle class holds up the mirror to itself in saucy eclipse of all those gods and kings who formerly held a monopoly on glorification. A school arises that abandons the religious and mythological subjects which have hitherto formed the nearly exclusive matter of European painting and substitutes, with a vengeance, the daily ordinary. Its genealogy can be traced from late-medieval calendar illustrations through the scenes of peasant life, but a crucial transition, I think, exists in the biblical scenes by Caravaggio and Rembrandt and (a bit later) de La Tour that garbed the incidents of Holy Scripture in the particularized faces and intimate gestures of a neighborhood household.

These Bible people are people we know: a Protestant assertion that brings the sublime down to earth. Dutch genre painting began in the 16th century with frankly cautionary illustrations of intemperance and brothel revelry. Soldiers, a constant Dutch presence in these decades of the Eighty Years War, were a favorite topic for “guardroom” paintings that showed them as tipsy and lusty - no military gloire here.

De Hooch began with brownish, stilted, claustral depictions of “merry company” - rest and recreation it was called in later days. A sinister though increasingly vague atmosphere of sexual negotiation dominates. The genius of genre painting was that, unlike more hierarchical and stylized and reverent modes, it posed no deflecting alternative to reality.

Rather, it insisted on it - the mundane quotidian in its ambiguous, charged stillness. And, just as sunlight broke through the leaded windows into the whitewashed rooms, a freshly felt glory infused representation. The Dutch virtues - fierce cleanness and orderliness in the face of threats from monarchal empires and the unruly sea - idealized the patient rounds of daily housekeeping. How central a sense of shelter was to the beauty of Dutch genre painting is indicated by the drab sunlessness of de Hooch’s outdoor paintings of women doing laundry or of families posing for a portrait: there was too much naked light for him; he could not form defining shadows or highlights. His Amsterdam pictures get darker and darker, framing a few spotlit figures. Circumambient light seen from inside and experienced within; that is de Hooch’s settled manner, and a metaphor for Protestantism’s new version of religious experience.

I am no art critic, by any means, but I do enjoy looking at art with new and rare insights.