835. COURT OF A DUTCH HOUSE.
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.
836. A VIEW IN HOLLAND.
Philip de Koninck (Dutch: 1619-1688).
Koninck, or Koning, was born at Amsterdam and became a pupil of Rembrandt. He painted historical subjects and portraits, but it is for his landscapes that he is now most admired. These are generally expansive views in which aerial perspective is well given: "The distances of the painters of the older schools had been full of objects and figures as minutely rendered as those on the foremost places, only ever so much smaller. Compare with these distances the simply treated expanse of country offered to view in P. de Koninck's landscapes. Here we do not have merely a series of objects getting smaller as they recede, but a far more generalised representation of the whole face of nature bathed in an atmosphere in which objects are lost to view" (Baldwin Brown's Fine Arts, p. 301).
There is a repetition of this picture in the Royal Museum at the Hague. One may presume that Koninck's pictures had aristocratic purchasers; for, unlike the painters of "pastoral landscape," he is fond of introducing persons of distinction—here it is a hawking party; in 974 a carriage-and-six with outriders.
837. THE HAY HARVEST.
Jan Lingelbach (Dutch: 1623-1674).
Though a German by birth, Lingelbach is included amongst the Dutch painters; for he lived chiefly in Amsterdam, and was largely employed in inserting the figures in the landscapes of Wynants and others. He also passed some years in Italy, and frequently painted Italian scenes and incidents.