What the Dutch Painter of Domestic Life Pieter de Hooch Can Teach Us About How to Embrace the Simple Joys of Staying Home

Week five of the shutdown. The initial dread and diversion
has faded. The existential doubt rises up and we wonder about our
basic survival—much as the first settlers of New Amsterdam did long
ago when they first arrived here to start a trading outpost. The
island of Manna-hatta has become a wild and empty place again and I
feel the Dutch spirit rising up from beneath the asphalt.

We Manhattanites are not known to be a domestic breed. We live
in a city filled with commercial, cultural, recreational
opportunities on every street corner and these have always been an
extension of our habitat. Many of us live in small apartments while
we surf the island; the streets are our hallways, the museums our
living rooms, the restaurants our kitchens, and the parks and
rivers our backyards.

Now, in the age of self-isolation, we find ourselves looking at
our four walls as the new boundaries of our universe. When we
venture outside, the streets are shuttered and we pass the sparse
masked figures at a distance. Everything that was the vitality and
freedom of New York has been closed. The last great Gotham shutdown
was the blackout during Hurricane Sandy. Those of us that remained
downtown huddled around candlelight with strangers and imagined we
were transported back to a simpler time without electricity or
internet. Now we are confined mostly to our homes but have all the
trappings of domesticity: hot water, toasters, Facebook—there are
no primordial distractions. Many of us cannot worry about money
because no one is paying us and we will not be paying anyone for
the time being. What do we do? We are stuck in a habitat that we
now realize was just a backdrop, a pied a
terre in the vast wonderland of Gotham. Now we cook,
wash, and sweep our floors like the tiger that paces the same
circle in his cage with bloody paws.

I look to a painting on my wall by the 17th-century Dutch
painter, Pieter de Hooch. It is a domestic scene of a mother calmly
peeling turnips in a corner while a child enters the threshold
carrying a flask and a plate, smiling down at a little dog looking
up in anticipation. I am relieved.

I recently returned from the artist’s first exhibit ever in the
Netherlands, which closed last month at the Museum
Prisenhof in Delft, steps away from his residence on the Oude
Delft. Depicting how we fit into our rectangular dwellings was
a lifelong fascination of De Hooch who was born in Rotterdam in
1629, moved to Delft by 1652 and then relocated to the more
prosperous Amsterdam sometime after 1660.

New Amsterdam lasted from 1626 until 1664, when four English
frigates sailed into the harbor demanding surrender. They later
exchanged the island of Surinam and the island of Run in the West
Indies to the Dutch as part of the Treaty of Breda.
New Amsterdam then had a population of 2,500 and practiced the
kind of free trade and multiculturalism that characterizes much of
what is New York today. According to Russell Shorto, author
of Island at the Center of the World, the
Dutch influence on America has often been overlooked due to
the English’s subsequent conquest and their own rewriting of
history.*

While the Dutch were fur trading and building homes in Manhattan
below Wall Street in the 17th century, on the other side of the
Atlantic, Pieter de Hooch was busy in Delft painting his famous
Dutch interiors that so inspired Vermeer, who lived a few blocks
away. Both artists focused on harmonizing the geometry of the walls
and fixtures within the home with the organic form and movement of
the human figure living within. While Vermeer’s work was more
studied and focused on the single figure entranced in her tasks, De
Hooch’s interiors were freer and filled with the air of human
relationships. These kinds of pictures were in demand in
17th-century Holland, where a new merchant class was established
with dispensable income from foreign trading or local production.
People worked hard and when they returned home, they wanted a
reminder of the true fruits of their labor: their home life.

The juxtaposition of geometry and human figure in European art
before the Dutch Golden Age was confined to religious subject
matter: whether twisted bodies on crosses, apostles among Greek
architecture, or groups of small figures set in grand churches and
cathedrals, this geometry was idealistic and often at odds with the
human figure. But now, a kinder, gentler geometry was brought into
the Dutch home: the sacred was now the domestic. This was the dawn
of genre painting.

I look back at the picture; the gently forward movement of the
child and the calm receptive seated matriarch gives the daily scene
an air of the Annunciation. Light flows through the beveled glass
window and dances upon the wall over the woman’s head. It bounces
off open doors and shutters, showing its simple but mesmerizing
journey from its outside source to our eyes. The tiled floor lifts
upwards to create a holographic dimension to the entire room while
simultaneously flattening into diamond shapes. A shaft of light is
seen mysteriously thru the crevice in a farther room.

De Hooch’s fascination with architectural elements like bricks
and tiles probably took a cue from his father, who was a
bricklayer. His mother was a midwife but passed away while he was
young and Pieter himself lost two of his seven children, likely to
the bubonic plague, which killed a tenth of Amsterdam’s population
in the 1660s. While traces of these losses may be read into some of
his room’s empty chairs, De Hooch’s most well-known pictures are
optimistic and unsurpassed as homages to the beauty, tenderness,
and dignity between mother and child in the home.

Movement and stillness, light and shadow, figure and rectangle
are reconciled by the ineffable… quietude, to coin a phrase by
the late Dutch curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walter
Liedkte. “What one most admires in De Hooch are qualities that seem
intangible, intuitive, even inarticulate…. the interior itself
seems to promise comfort and protection, while the light stroking
(as if feeling) different surfaces suggests pleasure in the beauty
of ordinary things.”

Now, with our inability to work, go out, and distract ourselves
with the business of the world, it is a good time to pierce through
the centuries and look at the walls around us, at the things De
Hooch painted; a child in the doorway, the shaft of afternoon
sunlight, a pitcher of water. His pictures force us to slow down
and savor the simple joys of our lives in our homes as the Dutch
did long ago—even beneath our feet. What else have we been striving
for?

Allen Hirsch is a painter, writer, and entrepreneur who
lives in Soho. The New York Times produced an Op-doc,
Long Live Benjamin, on the artist and his monkey, which won an
Emmy in 2018.

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Hooch Can Teach Us About How to Embrace the Simple Joys of Staying
Home appeared first on artnet News.