Kartenspieler in einem sonnigen Zimmer

In 1658 the Dutch Republic was at the height of its prosperity, and in Delft a small group of painters had grown fascinated by ordinary rooms and the way daylight moved through them. Pieter de Hooch was one of them, working in the same town and the same years as Vermeer. Here he sets a few men to their cards and their drink in what looks like an inn, and gives most of his attention to the light, falling through an open door and crossing a courtyard where a maid carries a jug of wine. When conservators cleaned the picture in 2019, they found a fingerprint pressed into the lower right corner, made in the wet paint before the varnish went on. The curator who studied it thinks it is almost certainly de Hooch's own.