亚麻橱柜旁的妇女室内景

In a Dutch household of the 1660s the linen cupboard was not just furniture. The mistress of the house kept its key, decided when the sheets came out, and in doing so held a small daily authority that everyone understood. Pieter de Hooch built this whole picture around that piece of furniture. Two women fold freshly pressed linen into the open cupboard, skirts hitched up to stay clean, while in the sunlit doorway behind them a child dawdles with a kolf stick, a kind of early hockey club. Painted in 1663, after De Hooch had moved to Amsterdam, it shows the orderly, well-run interior that Calvinist Holland prized, where each person and object had its proper place. The light travels from the front room straight through to a canal glimpsed at the far door.