Courtyard with a man smoking and a woman drinking

Around 1658 Pieter de Hooch was living in Delft, the same small city where Vermeer was working, and for a few short years he painted the quiet brick courtyards that are now his most admired pictures. This is one of them. In a walled yard beside a house, a soldier draws on a clay pipe while a woman drinks beer from a tall pass-glass, part of an old drinking game. A young girl comes in from the right carrying glowing embers to light the men's pipes. What holds it together is the ordinary architecture, the worn brick and mortar rendered with real patience, and soft light falling across the whole scene. De Hooch later moved to Amsterdam, and the work of these Delft years never quite came again.