Interior with a Woman weighing Gold Coin

Around 1660, in the small city of Delft, two painters were quietly working the same idea. Johannes Vermeer showed a woman holding an empty balance in a moment of stillness. Pieter de Hooch, living in the same town, gave the subject a different weight. His woman stands in profile, actually weighing gold coin, her fur-trimmed dress marking her as the wife of a wealthy money-lender. De Hooch cares less about her face, half-lost in her hood, than about the room around her. Through an open door he sets a doorkijkje, a glimpse into a further space, where light falls across a tiled floor from a window you never see. That trick of looking through one room into the next was becoming Delft's own signature.