Attributed to Samuel van Hoogstraten

Attributed to Samuel van Hoogstraten is the Louvre's own wording for a picture whose painter was found late. The picture is known in English as The Slippers. It is a view through three doorways into a Dutch house, with a broom against the wall, keys in a lock and a pair of slippers left on the floor.

For most of its life the picture went under other names. It was brought to England in 1839 as a work by Pieter de Hooch, the Delft painter of courtyards and interiors. In Paris it belonged to Théophile Thoré, the critic who, writing as William Bürger, brought Vermeer back to attention, and he lent it to an exhibition in 1866, still as a de Hooch. Along the way it gained a false monogram and the date 1658. Between 1866 and 1868 the Belgian painter Florent Willems added a little girl to the empty rooms, and she was gone again by 1883. A dog painted over the scene lasted until a restoration in 1933. When the Paris collector Princess Louis de Croÿ gave the picture to the Louvre in 1930, it came as a Vermeer.

The name Hoogstraten was first proposed in 1955, by the German art historian Eduard Plietzsch in a letter to the Louvre's curators. Hoogstraten, a pupil of Rembrandt from Dordrecht, had a lifelong interest in perspective and in views from one room into the next, and the Louvre dates the picture between 1650 and 1675.