Paying the Hostess

By the time de Hooch painted this, he had left Delft for Amsterdam, where the money was and where his quiet interiors grew a little grander and a little cooler. Here he steps outside, into the yard of a country inn. A well-dressed man leans toward the hostess over his bill, and the two of them seem to be settling accounts in a way that is not only about coins. The subject of a disputed reckoning turns up in Dutch travellers' diaries of the time, though it was rare in painting. Behind them the day goes on, a man carrying sheaves of wheat, a woman and child watching. The light moves across the yard in patches, the thing de Hooch cared about most.