Near the old town wall of Delft, the site of many of De Hooch’s courtyard paintings, two gentlemen and a woman are seated in a small wooden arbor, drinking wine. A maidservant carrying an earthenware jug and a basket, covered with a white cloth, and a little girl holding a birdcage cross the courtyard on their way toward a water pump that is attached to the house on the left. The two sets of steps seen through the open doors behind them seem to lead to the city ramparts.
This idyllic view of city life with spacious courtyards, trees, and vines contains compositional elements that are found in two other of De Hooch’s paintings of this period. The arbor, the wall, and the steps leading to the door in the wall form the setting for his painting A Family in a Courtyard, 1658–1660, in Vienna [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] Pieter de Hooch, A Family in a Courtyard, 1658–1660, oil on canvas, Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna. That work reveals that the arbor projects out from the wall and that its columns and capitals are made of flat boards attached to a wooden framework. The same arbor, wall, steps, and water pump are also visible in A Woman and a Maid in a Courtyard, c. 1660 (the last digit is illegible), in the National Gallery, London [fig. 2]
[fig. 2] Pieter de Hooch, A Woman and a Maid in a Courtyard, c. 1660, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London. Photo © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY. In both of those works, however, the relationship of the objects to the site varies, and neither of them contains the building to the left of the doorway. In the London painting, a small garden house is situated just to the right of the arbor, and the pump is in a totally different location.
These variations among the works confirm that De Hooch felt free to alter architectural elements for compositional reasons. Technical imaging reveals that he made significant adjustments to features in the present work through successive layers of thinly-applied paint (see Technical Summary). This process became visible to the naked eye after conservation treatment in 2016 removed nonoriginal discolored varnish and overpaint. The building at left, for example, did not initially extend to the top of the composition. Instead De Hooch had envisioned a smaller structure with a gabled roof and a second structure behind it. Visible pentimenti on the right side of the wall also indicate compositional changes that are reminiscent of the architecture in the courtyard scene in London. While it is unlikely that any of these scenes represent an actual location, faint, incised lines along the left wall and at either side of the doorway indicate De Hooch’s efforts to produce convincing, illusionistic spaces. MacLaren is undoubtedly correct in stressing that many of these views were based on views from gardens behind the houses on the west side of Delft’s main canal, the Oude Gracht. De Hooch’s wife lived in this area, near the Binnenwatersloot, before they were engaged, and presumably De Hooch moved there after their marriage.
In this painting, as in other of De Hooch’s courtyard scenes, one senses a harmonious relationship between the serving woman and her employers. Although no commissions for these works are known, one wonders if De Hooch’s interest in the theme stems from his own experiences working as a servant for the linen merchant Justus de la Grange in the early 1650s. De Hooch’s sensitivity to the relationship of women to children may also relate to his own family experiences: a son, born in 1655, and a daughter, born in 1656, would have been approximately the ages of the children he so often represented in his paintings from the end of that decade.
Original entry by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., April 24, 2014.
Revised by Alexandra Libby to incorporate information from a new technical examination.
December 9, 2019
