In the shadows

Dutch master de Hooch waits 350 years to show his light

by Leon Nigrosh

PIETER DE HOOCH At the Wadsworth Atheneum, 600 Main Street, Hartford, Connecticut, through February 28, 1999.

Little is known about 17th-century Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch. He was born in Rotterdam. His father was a bricklayer, his mother a midwife. He was the eldest of five children, and his siblings all died before he did. He was married and fathered seven children while he lived and painted in the city of Delft and later in Amsterdam. As we look at the exhibit of 48 of de Hooch's paintings on display at the Wadsworth Atheneum, it becomes obvious how large a role his family and surroundings played in de Hooch's (pronounced HOKE) subject matter and execution of his work.

As most young painters of his time, de Hooch's first works were devoted to the traditional genre of tavern scenes. Several panels on exhibit are filled with raucous and somewhat bawdy individuals smoking, drinking, and generally carrying on. Off-duty soldiers, still wearing their light armor, are depicted playing tric-trac or flirting with bar maidens. But even in these early stages of his development, we can see that de Hooch was less interested in his subjects and more concerned with refining his palette, improving his handling of light sources, and capturing the appropriate perspective. In his early painting A Man Offering a Woman a Glass of Wine, his two main characters are colorful and well conceived; but he has obvious proportion trouble with the man in the rear, and he virtually painted out the background to hide his problems with perspective.

Within two years, something occurred (perhaps it was his move to the more picturesque city of Delft) and de Hooch perfected his sense of perspective to the extent that he could place two or more vanishing points in the same composition and produce a comfortable sense of rightness for the viewer. This adept sense of composition is noticeable when we compare A Woman with a Baby in Her Lap, and a Small Child with Woman with Child in an Interior, both produced in 1658. These two completely different scenes of home and hearth take place in the same room, but, by subtly shifting the viewpoint, de Hooch creates two different moods.

These two paintings also serve as studies in light. Each time we look from one to the other we notice the different ways de Hooch plays the light coming from outside across the ceramic tiled floors, the furniture, and the doors. His ceaseless attraction to multiple light sources is also evident in one of his many family bedroom scenes, A Mother and Child with Its Head in Her Lap. Not only do we have the contrejour light coming directly at us from the distance, but he illuminates his characters with oblique light coming off the wall from a small overhead window.

While volumes could be devoted to de Hooch's technical mastery, it is his depiction of apparent everyday life that is so enthralling. What appear to be snapshots of the mundane actually turn out to be highly constructed (and often laboriously reworked) morality tales. In his A Woman Drinking with Two Men, and a Serving Woman, the play of light and color is in evidence, highlighting his playful subjects. But the painting on the wall is a reproduction of the Education of the Virgin, which offers a strong moral counterpoint to the scene.

Couple with a Parrot shows two young people enticing the bird from its cage with a bit of wine-soaked bread. While today we might simply marvel at the exquisite rendition of the Turkish rug, the perspective layout of the floor tiles, and the shadowed doorway vignette, in 1675 it was a well-known fact that a bird escaping its cage signified the loss of virginity. The broom and bucket in the foreground are symbols of chastity, family, and homelife.

Each painting is so full of technical mastery, color, detail, historical artifacts, allegory, morality, and symbolism that it can take a great deal of time to fully appreciate them individually. Together they represent the zenith of the output of an outstanding 17th-century Dutch master who got lost in the shadows of Vermeer, Hals, Rembrandt and had to wait 350 years for his first one-man show.

The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call (860) 278-2670.