Cour avec une tonnelle

Around 1658 the small city of Delft held two painters quietly rethinking how ordinary domestic life could be shown, Pieter de Hooch and his neighbour Vermeer. De Hooch's subject was the back courtyard, the brick-and-mortar working part of a Dutch house, which he treated with the care usually saved for a church interior. This scene has a near-twin, now in London, and the two even share the same carved stone tablet set above the archway. Here the figures are more at leisure, and a dog has wandered into the yard. What holds it together is the plain geometry of worn brick, a scrubbed path and a vine-covered arbour, each surface given its own weight of light. He left Delft for Amsterdam a couple of years later, where his rooms grew grander and the courtyards mostly disappeared from his work.