Frau, die einen Säugling stillt, mit einem Kind und einem Hund

De Hooch's finest work is packed into a few years in Delft, from about 1658, and Delft then was a city still rebuilding. In October 1654 the state gunpowder store in the middle of town had exploded and destroyed a large part of it. What he painted in those years is quiet to the point of stillness, a woman feeding her baby while an older child busies herself with the dog. Dutch moralists of the period pressed women to nurse their own children instead of sending them out to a wet nurse, so a domestic scene like this carried an argument with it. The Samuel H. Kress Foundation gave the canvas to San Francisco in 1961, and the Legion of Honor shows it under a plainer name, Woman with Children in an Interior.