The Courtyard of a House in Delft

Pieter de Hooch painted this Delft courtyard in 1658, in the same handful of years his neighbor Johannes Vermeer was turning quiet domestic rooms into art in the same small town. A woman leads a child down a worn brick passage while another figure stands with her back turned at the far end. Set into the wall on the left is a real stone tablet, salvaged from a demolished cloister in Delft, and its Dutch inscription can still be read: it says this is Saint Jerome's vale, for those who wish to walk in patience and meekness, and that we must first go down before we are raised. De Hooch signed and dated the picture on the archway. He had lived on that very street only a few years earlier.