Kücheninterieur mit einer Frau, einem Kind und einer Magd

By about 1670 Pieter de Hooch had left Delft, where he'd painted his sunniest courtyards, and moved to Amsterdam after wealthier patrons. Here is a calmer, later interior: a woman sits by the fireplace with a basket of pears in her lap while a small child holds one out to a servant girl bent over a cupboard. The light falls the way it always does in de Hooch, catching the floor tiles and a jug on the table. He liked to hang a picture inside his pictures, and the one over this mantel shows Lot made drunk by his daughters, one of the Bible's grimmer family tales, set right above a scene of everyday household order.