A Mother's Duty

Pieter de Hooch worked in Delft in the late 1650s, the same small Dutch city and years as Vermeer, and like Vermeer he made the quiet light of ordinary rooms his subject. Here a mother sits in a sober bedroom searching her child's hair for lice, the child's head resting in her lap. It is about as humble a moment as painting takes on. De Hooch fills the room with the things of a real Dutch household, blue Delft tiles, a curtained box bed, a little potty chair in the corner. His trademark was the through-view, and beyond the doorway he opens a second room flooded with sun, with a glimpse of a garden past it.