Il bicchiere vuoto

This is Pieter de Hooch before the pictures that made him famous. In the early 1650s, still a young man and years away from the calm sunlit courtyards of his Delft period, he was painting soldiers and drink. A woman leans in to hand an officer a full glass of wine while, off to the side, others sit absorbed in a game of cards and one more looks on. Scenes of officers, women, and wine were popular in the young Dutch Republic, not long after decades of war with Spain had finally ended. The handling here is darker and rougher than his later work, and for a long time nobody took it for his. An early cataloguer filed it under the name of another Dutch painter, Gabriel Metsu, before it was recognized as a de Hooch.