室内与两名男子及女仆一同饮酒的女子

Pieter de Hooch signed and dated this interior in 1658, during the years he spent in Delft, the same small Dutch city where Vermeer was working at the very same moment. It is an everyday genre scene, a woman drinking at a table with two men and a serving maid, the kind of well-off domestic company that Dutch buyers liked to hang in their own comfortable homes. But de Hooch's real subject is almost never the anecdote. It is space and daylight. He lays out a floor of black and white tiles and opens a doorway at the back, so the eye travels from the dim front room toward light falling somewhere deeper in the house, an ordered perspective he handled with unusual precision.