Woman with a Water Pitcher, and a Man by a Bed ("The Maidservant")

At a glance this looks like one more calm Dutch household, sunlight falling through a window onto a tidy front room. Look at what de Hooch actually laid out, though, and the reading shifts. There is a plate of oysters, long taken as an aphrodisiac, a curtained bed, and a man waiting beside it while the woman brings a pitcher. Scholars think the scene is set not in a respectable home but in a brothel. De Hooch had made his name in Delft, in close conversation with Vermeer, and you can feel it in the careful geometry of the window and the fall of daylight. He painted this around 1667, after moving to Amsterdam, still building rooms out of light long after he had left Vermeer's town behind.