Pieter de Hooch - A Musical Party in a Courtyard [1677]

he woman on the left is playing a viola da gamba. The houses seen across the canal are similar to those on the Keizersgracht, Amsterdam. The left-hand one bears a tablet with the date 1620 and is in the style of Hendrick de Keyser (1565 – 1621). The painting is characteristic of de Hooch’s Amsterdam period. In contrast to the middle-class interiors of his Delft paintings, he now focuses on more sophisticated domestic settings and elegant figures.

The son of a stonemason, de Hooch (1629 – 1684) was born in Rotterdam. According to Houbraken, he was trained by Nicolaes Bercham, one of the leading Dutch painters of Italianate landscapes, who was mainly active at Haarlem. By 1653 de Hooch was in Delft in employment as a servant and a painter. His works of the 1650s may be indebted to the perspectival studies of Carel Fabritius, who was in Delft by 1651. By 1663 de Hooch had moved to Amsterdam; his later paintings record fashionable life in the city, and utilise a darker and richer range of colours derived from Nicolas Maes.