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By the 1670s Pieter de Hooch had left Delft, where he had painted his famous sunlit courtyards, and settled in Amsterdam. His late interiors like this one trade the bright Delft daylight for something richer and dimmer, the taste of a wealthier city. A man reads a letter aloud while a woman listens, her face caught in a half-dreaming look. Letters were a favourite Dutch subject in these years because they carried news from absent husbands, merchants and lovers away at sea, and the painter leaves it to us to wonder which this is. De Hooch trained on the tiled floor and the window light the same careful perspective he had perfected in Delft years earlier, in the same years Vermeer was working there.