A Woman and Two Men in an Arbor

Around 1657 Pieter de Hooch was living in Delft and working out what kind of painter he wanted to be. This small panel catches him mid-change. The subject is an old one, a garden of love, the sort of elegant open-air party earlier Dutch artists liked to paint, with a woman and two men sitting together over drinks in a leafy arbour. But de Hooch has pulled it down out of fantasy into an ordinary Delft garden, quieter and more domestic. Within a year or two he would drop the merry company altogether and start painting the calm sunlit courtyards and interiors he is remembered for. It is a modest, worn little picture, more telling for where it sits in his story than for itself.