s
lighted from the sunlit street, and another from a closed court.
Sometimes his figures stand in an open courtyard, whilst behind is
a paved passage leading into the house. All his subjects are of the
domestic Dutch life of the seventeenth century, but the arrangement
in rooms, passages, courtyards, and enclosed gardens admitted of much
variation. We never feel that the range of subjects is limited, for
the light transforms each into a scene of that poetic beauty which
it was Peter de Hoogh's great gift to discern, enjoy, and record.

The painting is delicate and finished, meant to be seen from near at
hand. It is always the room that interests him, as much as the people
in it. The painting of the window with its little coats of arms,
transparent yet diffusing the light, is exquisitely done. A chair with
the cushion upon it, just like that, occurs again and again in his
pictures, the cushion being used as a welcome bit of colour in the
scheme. Most of all, the floors, whether paved with stone as in this
picture, or with brick as in the courtyards, are painted with the
delightful precise care that the Van Eycks gave to their accessories.
In Peter de Hoogh's vision of the world there is the same appreciation
of the objects of daily use as was displayed by the fifteenth-century
Flemish painters whenever their sacred subjects gave them opportunity.
In the seventeenth century it was more congenial to the Flemish and
Dutch temperament to paint their own country, and domestic scenes from
their own lives, than pictures of devotion.

Other artists besides Peter de Hoogh painted people in their own houses.
In the pictures of Terborch ladies in satin dresses play the spinet
and the guitar. Jan Steen depicted peasants revelling on their holidays
or in taverns. Peter de Hoogh was the painter of middle-class life,
and discovered in its circumstances, likewise, abounding romance.

The Dutchman of the seventeenth century loved his house and his garden,
and every inch of the country in which he lived, rescued as it had
been from invasions by armies and the sea. Many painters never left
Holland, and found beauty enough there to fill well-spent lives in
painting its flatness beneath over-arching clear or clouded skies.
Although the earlier Flemings had had a great love of landscape, they
had not conceived it as a subject suitable for a whole picture, but
only for a background. In the sixteenth century the figures gradually
get smaller