Donna che prepara pane e burro per un bambino

Pieter de Hooch painted quiet Dutch households at the height of the Republic's prosperity, and this one dates to about 1661. A woman spreads butter on a slice of bread while a small boy waits, his hat pressed to his chest and his hands folded. That gesture is the point of the picture. Dutch families of the day set great store by raising polite, self-controlled children, and the boy's patient manners would have read to viewers as a lesson well taught. Light falls through a window at the back and travels across the tiled floor into a further room, the kind of deep, orderly interior de Hooch had worked out in Delft in the same years Vermeer lived a few streets away.