 |
| Detail of Woman Drinking with Soldiers (1658) by Pieter de Hooch |
I love paintings from the Dutch Golden Age. Although Vermeer is my favorite, I often feel that Pieter de Hooch comes in second. It's the intimacy of the interior genre scene, a humanizing image, that captures my enthusiasm, pulling my imagination back in time to life in the 17th century.
Pieter de Hooch's work has an undeniable beauty, a lustre, that entrances the eye with subtle plays of light, delineations of space, colors both muted and bright. And the narrative of the image is perhaps the thing that I adore most. His paintings are frozen instances of a tale, as if caught in amber, making the viewer consider the activity which is taking place and that which may arise from this moment.
 |
| Courtyard of a House in Delft (1658) by Pieter de Hooch |
Back in 1996, I once assigned myself a writing practice: for a month, look at a new de Hooch each day and outline a story inspired by it. Nothing ever came of it, but it was a fun and challenging experiment. Maybe I'll try it again some day.
