酒を飲む男と、鸚鵡に餌をやる子供のいる二人の女性のいる室内

By around 1670 Pieter de Hooch had moved from quiet Delft to booming Amsterdam, and his rooms grew richer to match his new city. Here a young man sits drinking wine at a table while, over by the window, a woman in a red jacket trimmed with ermine holds up a small child to watch a parrot being fed at its cage. That parrot is the tell. Bright tropical birds like it arrived in Dutch ports on the ships of the trading companies, and to keep one was to advertise reach and money, a live souvenir of a global trade brought into the parlour. De Hooch built his pictures around light moving through a room, the glow off the window, the shadow under the table. The ermine and the exotic bird set this family firmly among Amsterdam's comfortable merchant class.