Deconstructing A Maturer Pieter De Hooch - 2525 Words

Deconstructing a Maturer Pieter de Hooch Pieter de Hooch has humble origins. In 1629, he was born in Rotterdam in a butcher’s family. Receiving his early training under Ludolph de Jongh in Rotterdam, De Hooch later served his apprenticeship under the landscape painter Nicolaes Pietersz Berchem in Haarlem. He is recorded as a painter and footman to a wealthy merchant-adventurer Justus de la Grange in 1653. In 1654, he married Jannetje van der Burch of Delft, and later he had seven children. Moving to Delft after his marriage, he was registered with the Delft guild and became an independent artist in 1655. During the years in Delft, he produced his most characteristic works. In 1661, he moved to Amsterdam and remained there for the rest of his life. De Hooch’s three periods in Rotterdam, Delft, and Haarlem represent his three phases in painting with gradually maturer artistry. This paper uses De Hooch’s The Visit, a transitional work that was executed in 1657, his early Delft period, as a case study to e xamine the development in De Hooch’s artistic style in terms of the scene, composition and perspective. The Visit, also titled A Merry Company with Two Men and Two Women, delineates an familiar but interesting scene in which two women entertain two visiting gentlemen in a seventeenth-century Dutch living room. The group of four people portrayed in this representation can be further subdivided into two groups. In one group, wearing a knowing smile, the woman appareled a