La Visite

Around 1657 in Delft, de Hooch was working a few streets from Johannes Vermeer, and the two seem to have watched each other closely. This is one of his first paintings to build a room with strict perspective, the light falling from a side window in the street-facing front room of a narrow Dutch house. Four figures share wine and a plate of oysters. Contemporaries would have read those oysters, along with the curtained bed in the shadows, as signs that this is no respectable household but a brothel. De Hooch keeps it understated. It is the same problem Vermeer was solving nearby, how to make daylight move convincingly through an ordinary room.