Woman Peeling Vegetables in the Back Room of a Dutch House

In December 1805, the month of Austerlitz, the Louvre was the Musée Napoléon, and its director, Vivant Denon, paid for this picture out of his own pocket. A Paris dealer named Lafontaine had brought it from Holland shortly before. Denon advanced the money and was repaid in 1806. The Louvre counts it among the first of de Hooch's quiet interiors from his Delft years and dates it around 1657. Look past the woman at her tub of vegetables and the small child at her side, through the open door, where a second woman stands with her back to us in a sunlit yard. The museum's catalogue singles out that distant figure. A copy with variations exists, possibly a fake, and the Dutch scholar Hofstede de Groot once took it for the original.