Intérieur avec deux femmes conversant, un homme et un chien

By 1680 the trade that had supported pictures like this was in bad shape. The French invasion of 1672 knocked the bottom out of the Dutch art market. Dealers failed, prices fell, and many painters of de Hooch's generation stopped or found other work. He kept going. He had left Delft for Amsterdam around 1660, and his later interiors follow the money of that city, with marble floors, taller rooms and costlier clothes than the quiet Delft courtyards he is better known for. This is one of the last of them, painted around 1680, four years before he was buried in Amsterdam. It hangs in Aix-en-Provence under a French title, Le Depart pour le marche, the departure for the market.