Pieter de Hooch   
(1629-1684)

Painter of Sunny Holland.

   A painter of Dutch courtyards and interiors, sometimes of a very humble nature, and sometimes showing the aristocratic side of Dutch life in palace halls, with finely robed characters.  He seemed content with his picture if it contained handsome color, atmosphere, shadow, and above all sunlight.  His sunlit passageways and courtyards with bricks, his floors and windows and kitchen utensils, his housewife with her child, are simple and humble enough in theme; but he has made them quite glorious, quite splendid as art. 
The people of his day, however, did not care for them.  He achieved no fame until long after his death, and then in England rather than in his native land. Authorities in England made such a fuss about his work that Holland swiftly came to the conclusion that it had neglected one of its great men.  Then began the difficult business of finding out something about him.After great searching it was finally determined that he was born in Rotterdam about 1629.  What he did and where he lived during the first twenty-six years of his life are unknown.  He is described as a painter and servant to a certain merchant, who was also something of a patron of the arts.   

He lived in Delft for two years, from 1655 to 1657, as the record of his marriage there and his membership in the painters' guild prove.  From that time until he turned up in Amsterdam eleven years later there is no trace of him.  He painted pictures in 1677; but after that all record of him is lost, except that he died in Haarlem about 1684.

 De Hooch was one of the kindliest and most charming painters of homely subjects that Holland has produced. All his paintings that have survived are small.  The only large canvas that he ever painted was destroyed in the fire of Rotterdam in 1864.  Sometimes he chose a drawing room with dancing cavaliers and ladies as his subjects; but he much preferred the homelier scenes, especially interiors illuminated by different intensities of light, and his special joy seems to have been in painting furniture.

 Today he is one of the Dutch immortals, and his pictures that occasionally find their way into an auction room sell for enormous prices.