Merry Company with a mandolin and a dog

Pieter de Hooch is remembered for quiet Delft courtyards of the 1650s, sunlight falling across brick and a servant in a doorway. This one comes later, from 1673, after he had moved to Amsterdam and begun painting the richer households there. A man plucks a mandolin, a maid comes in, and behind them a couple leans close while a small dog looks on. The rooms in his late work grow larger and more expensively dressed, and many feel the magic of the early pictures fading in them. These were hard years for de Hooch. He would die in an Amsterdam institution about a decade after finishing this, his name half-forgotten until the nineteenth century brought it back.