Soldier paying a landlady in an inn

De Hooch dated this 1658, the year he was in Delft painting the sunlit courtyards and back rooms that made his name. Soldiers drinking in taverns were an older subject for him, from his first years as a painter, and here the money is the point, coins counted out to the woman who keeps the house. A century later the picture belonged to Gerrit Braamcamp, an Amsterdam timber merchant whose collection was auctioned off after his death in July 1771. That sale was followed all over Europe. Catherine the Great bought heavily at it, and the ship carrying her purchases home, the Vrouw Maria, sank off the Finnish coast that October with the paintings on board. This one went the other way, bought by the dealer Pieter Fouquet for the third Earl of Bute, and it is still in the Bute family's house on the Isle of Bute.