Leisure Time in an Elegant Setting

Pieter de Hooch

ca. 1663–65 · Oil on canvas · Robert Lehman Collection

Like his contemporary Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch played a pioneering role in the advancement of genre painting in seventeenth century Holland. He was especially gifted as a painter of interiors--complex spatial arrangements stunningly beautiful in the manipulation of light. The Lehman picture is richly decorated with a marble floor and gilt-leather wall coverings, articulated by diffuse light from the window at left. The merry dialogue in the near ground is foiled by the mysterious encounter of a young man and elderly bearded figure in the antechamber and vestibule. De Hooch achieves extraordinary clarity and geometry in this grandly furnished chamber, qualities evocative of paintings he made in Amsterdam in the 1660s.

Artist

Pieter de Hooch

Date

ca. 1663–65

Medium

Oil on canvas

Department

Robert Lehman Collection

Credit line

Robert Lehman Collection, 1975