A Mother's Duty
Pieter de Hooch, 1660
Pieter de Hooch painted this domestic scene around 1658-1660, during the mature phase of the Dutch artist, when he specialised in interiors of middle-class homes lit by light entering through a door or window. Here a woman, seated in profile, picks lice from her daughter's hair while the girl kneels before her, her head resting in her lap. The gestures are simple and everyday, and the picture captures the kind of family intimacy that interested audiences in the Dutch Golden Age. The composition works in layers: in the foreground, a child's chair; at the back, a recessed bed with curtains; on the left, a door open onto a second room, where a garden with slender trees can be glimpsed. A small dog near that door adds a touch of domestic life. The colour is restrained, with the red blouse and blue skirt as the main accents against the muted tones of the interior. The work is regarded as one of the finest examples by De Hooch in the Netherlands. His signature appears on the chair, and its authenticity was confirmed after an earlier misattribution in nineteenth-century catalogues. The design also proved successful, since the painter returned to variations of this same bedroom with its doorway to an outer room.
- Painter
- Pieter de Hooch
- Date
- 1660
- Medium
- oil paint, canvas
- Dimensions
- 52 × 61 cm
- Museum
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
- Genre
- genre art
- Depicts
- dog, high chair, doorway, box-bed, woman, child
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