Женщина и двое мужчин в беседке

Around 1657 Pieter de Hooch was living in Delft and working out what kind of painter he wanted to be. This small panel catches him mid-change. The subject is an old one, a garden of love, the sort of elegant open-air party earlier Dutch artists liked to paint, with a woman and two men sitting together over drinks in a leafy arbour. But de Hooch has pulled it down out of fantasy into an ordinary Delft garden, quieter and more domestic. Within a year or two he would drop the merry company altogether and start painting the calm sunlit courtyards and interiors he is remembered for. It is a modest, worn little picture, more telling for where it sits in his story than for itself.