A Dutch Courtyard

By 1658 the long war with Spain was a decade over, and the soldiers who had fought it were suddenly ordinary men with time on their hands. Pieter de Hooch, then working in Delft, paints two of them in a walled brick courtyard, sharing a drink with a serving woman. One puffs a clay pipe. The other watches her tip back a tall pass-glass, the kind used for drinking games, marked with rings you had to reach in one gulp. A small girl comes in from the right carrying glowing embers to light the pipes. Through the open door in the wall you can see out to a garden and, above it, the tower of Delft's Nieuwe Kerk, which fixes exactly where we are standing.