Nursing Mother, and Child with Serving Maid

De Hooch left Delft for Amsterdam around 1661, and it changed what he painted. In Delft he had worked out his whole manner in modest brick courtyards, with servants and soldiers standing in the sun. Amsterdam in the 1660s was the richest city in Europe, and the houses he was now painting had tall windows, hard polished floors and rooms opening into further rooms. This canvas, from about 1663, comes out of that move. A mother sits with her child, a maid works nearby, and a doorway carries the eye through into daylight beyond. The long view from one room into the next is the device he is known for. It reached Vienna in 1903 as a gift from the collectors Karl and Rosalia Goldschmidt, after a century of passing through sale rooms in Paris and Amsterdam.