The Bedroom

De Hooch painted this in Delft around 1658, in the few good years he spent there. In that same small town, at that same moment, Vermeer was beginning the luminous interiors he became famous for, and the two men were clearly circling the same problem, how to make ordinary daylight cross a room and feel true. Here a child pushes open a door, and light arrives from two directions at once, the windows on the left and the open doorway ahead, catching in the child's hair. Beyond, the mother shakes out the bedding. Nothing happens that would make a story. De Hooch's whole subject is the passage from the bright front room, through the dim doorway, into the sunlit space behind, a house you feel you could walk through.