_Pieter de Hooch_ (Dutch: 1630-about 1677). _See 794._
A courtyard at Delft: superbly painted, and a good picture of Dutch
home life--of its neatness, its cleanliness, its quiet, and its
content. Notice over the entrance a commemorative inscription, partly
covered already by vine leaves, dated 1614. The day's work is done,
and the wife stands in the porch, waiting for her husband's return;
a servant brings down the child too into the courtyard to greet its
father. "It is natural to think your own house and garden the nicest
house and garden that ever were.... They are a treasure to you which
no money could buy,--the leaving them is always pain,--the return to
them a new thrill and wakening to life. They are a home and a place of
root to you, as if you were founded on the ground like its walls, or
grew into it like its flowers" (_Fors Clavigera_, 1876, p. 51). Such a
home (says Mr. Pater in his _Imaginary Portraits_) "was, in its minute
and busy wellbeing, like an epitome of Holland itself, with all the
good-fortune of its thriving genius reflected, quite spontaneously, in
the national taste. The nation had learned to content itself with a
religion which told little, or not at all, on the outsides of things.
But we may fancy that something of the religious spirit had gone,
according to the law of the transmutation of force, into the scrupulous
care for cleanliness, into the grave, old-world, conservative beauty
of Dutch houses, which meant that the life people maintained in them
was normally affectionate and pure." This picture was much admired by
Constable. "The least mannered," he said, "and consequently the best
pictures I have seen, are some of the works of De Hooge, particularly
one of an outdoor subject, at Sir R. Peel's. His indoors are as
good, but less difficult, as being less lustrous" (Leslie's _Life of
Constable_, p. 299). The picture is signed, and dated 1658.