In a walled courtyard behind a brick house, two soldiers seated at a table enjoy a moment’s banter with a serving woman. While one of the soldiers puffs smoke from his clay pipe, the other, holding a Raeren earthenware jug, laughingly watches the woman drink beer from her pass-glass. The pass-glass was used in drinking games. Each participant had to drink down to a circular line on the glass; failing to reach the exact level, he or she would be required to drink to the next ring down. Only when this was done successfully would the glass be passed on to the next participant. A young girl approaches on the right, bringing glowing embers for the men’s pipes. The open door in the brick wall reveals a stepped path that leads past a wooded yard to a distant house, which is also visible above the wall. The tower of the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft rises over the wooden palisade on the far left.
The painting is one of the most accomplished of De Hooch’s “Delft Style” works from about 1660. The ordered, harmonious arrangement of architectural and figural elements creates a quiet and peaceful mood. The soft light that pervades the scene and the careful way in which De Hooch indicates the bricks and mortar of the buildings and courtyard enhance the painting’s naturalistic qualities. Its measured harmony also comes from the artist’s sensitivity to color and the way in which he intersperses accents of red, blue, and white throughout the scene. Particularly effective is the satiny sheen of the young girl’s blue dress, which he has suggested through the use of yellow highlights.
De Hooch achieved this sense of order by carefully manipulating the perspective and the placement of compositional elements. He strengthened the figural group by adjusting the woman’s position and bringing her closer to the table, which was revealed by Infrared ReflectographyA photographic or digital image analysis method which captures the absorption/emission characteristics of reflected infrared radiation. The absorption of infrared wavelengths varies for different pigments, so the resultant image can help distinguish the pigments that have been used in the painting or underdrawing. at 1.2 to 2.5 microns. He also seems to have enlarged the little girl and moved her nearer to the house so that she became superimposed over the juncture of the house and the rear wall of the courtyard. Her placement and that of the bright orange-red window shutter directly above her serve to reduce the strong sense of recession created by the receding perspective of the building.
The brick wall behind the figures is presumably a section of the old city wall of Delft. As in Woman and Child in a Courtyard, this courtyard was probably situated in the area of the city near the Binnenwatersloot. It is nevertheless unlikely that De Hooch represented an exact location. As can be demonstrated in his other paintings, including Woman and Child in a Courtyard, he frequently combined architectural motifs in an imaginary way for compositional reasons. In this instance, he has also taken liberties in his depiction of the peaked roof of the tower of the Nieuwe Kerk: it lacks the small spires that actually ring the top of the tower.
De Hooch’s earliest genre scenes frequently depict soldiers sitting around a table smoking and drinking, attended to by a serving woman, a subject he has here moved outdoors into the courtyard of a middle-class home. The men and women in these scenes are quite animated and playfully interact with one another, a pictorial approach also evident in the easy banter between the soldiers and the maidservant seen here. The sun-filled setting with the distant church tower gives the scene an added sense of good will and optimism, one in which the threat of war that had so recently weighed heavily on the Dutch was no longer felt.
A replica of this painting is in the Mauritshuis, The Hague. The major compositional difference between the two works is the absence of the seated soldier. This figure, however, does appear in X-radiographs [see X-radiographyA photographic or digital image analysis method that visually records an object's ability to absorb or transmit x-rays. The differential absorption pattern is useful for examining an object's internal structure as well as for comparing the variation in pigment types.] of the painting and seems to have been painted out by a later hand. The breastplate worn by this soldier appears in other De Hooch paintings from this period, including A Soldier Paying a Hostess, which is dated 1658. The Washington painting is shown hanging on the rear wall in a watercolor of a Dutch interior, dated 1783, by W. J. Laquy (1738–1798), a German artist then working in Amsterdam (see the 1995 archived version of this entry for the comparative image). The drawing illustrates that the painting was then in a Dutch-style gold frame. The provenance of the painting before 1820 is unknown, thus we do not know in whose home Laquy saw it.
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.
April 24, 2014
