A Woman with a Basket of Beans in a Garden

Pieter de Hooch is remembered for quiet indoor rooms, sunlight crossing a tiled floor, but here he steps out into a walled kitchen garden on the edge of a Dutch town. The brick architecture behind the woman seems modelled on a real almshouse in Leiden, one of the charitable housing courts that dotted the Republic, where the old and poor were given rooms around a shared yard. Look at the closed window shutter on the left. De Hooch painted a small portrait onto it, a bearded man some have taken for the emperor Charles V, and scholars still argue about why it is there. The woman herself just stands at the right with her basket of beans, on a scrap of lawn run through with weeds, doing nothing in particular on an ordinary summer afternoon.