HONTHORST, GERARD VAN (1590-1656), Dutch painter of Utrecht, was brought up at the school of Bloemart, who exchanged the style of the Franckens for that of the pseudo-Italians at the beginning of the 16th century. Infected thus early with a mania which came to be very general in Holland, Honthorst went to Italy, where he copied the naturalism and eccentricities of Michelangelo da Caravaggio. Home again about 1614, after acquiring a considerable practice in Rome, he set up a school at Utrecht which flourished exceedingly; and he soon became so fashionable that Sir Dudley Carleton, then English envoy at the Hague, recommended his works to the earl of Arundel and Lord Dorchester. At the same time the queen of Bohemia, sister of Charles I. and electress palatine, being an exile in Holland, gave him her countenance and asked him to teach her children drawing; and Honthorst, thus approved and courted, became known to Charles I., who invited him to England. There he painted several portraits, and a vast allegory, now at Hampton Court, of Charles and his queen as Diana and Apollo in the clouds receiving the duke of Buckingham as Mercury and guardian of the king of Bohemia’s children. Charles I., whose taste was flattered alike by the energy of Rubens and the elegance of Van Dyck, was thus first captivated by the fanciful mediocrity of Honthorst, who though a poor executant had luckily for himself caught, as Lord Arundel said, “much of the manner of Caravaggio’s colouring, then so much esteemed at Rome.” It was his habit to transmute every subject into a night scene, from the Nativity, for which there was warrant in the example of Correggio, to the penitence of the Magdalen, for which there was no warrant at all. But unhappily this caprice, though “sublime in Allegri and Rembrandt,” was but a phantasm in the hands of Honthorst, whose prosaic pencil was not capable of more than vulgar utterances, and art gained little from the repetition of these quaint vagaries. Sandrart gave the measure of Honthorst’s popularity at this period when he says that he had as many as twenty apprentices at one time, each of whom paid him a fee of 100 florins a year. In 1623 he was president of his gild at Utrecht. After that he went to England, returning to settle anew at Utrecht, where he married. His position amongst artists was acknowledged to be important, and in 1626 he received a visit from Rubens, whom he painted as the honest man sought for and found by Diogenes Honthorst. In his home at Utrecht Honthorst succeeded in preserving the support of the English monarch, for whom he finished in 1631 a large picture of the king and queen of Bohemia “and all their children.” For Lord Dorchester about the same period he completed some illustrations of the Odyssey; for the king of Denmark he composed incidents of Danish history, of which one example remains in the gallery of Copenhagen. In the course of a large practice he had painted many likenesses—Charles I. and his queen, the duke of Buckingham, and the king and queen of Bohemia. He now became court painter to the princess of Orange, settled (1637) at the Hague, and painted in succession at the Castle of Ryswick and the House in the Wood. The time not consumed in producing pictures was devoted to portraits. Even now his works are very numerous, and amply represented in English and Continental galleries. His most attractive pieces are those in which he cultivates the style of Caravaggio, those, namely, which represent taverns, with players, singers and eaters. He shows great skill in reproducing scenes illuminated by a single candle. But he seems to have studied too much in dark rooms, where the subtleties of flesh colour are lost in the dusky smoothness and uniform redness of tints procurable from farthing dips. Of great interest still, though rather sharp in outline and hard in modelling, are his portraits of the Duke of Buckingham and Family (Hampton Court), the King and Queen of Bohemia (Hanover and Combe Abbey), Mary de Medici (Amsterdam town-hall), 1628, the Stadtholders and their Wives (Amsterdam and Hague), Charles Louis and Rupert, Charles I.’s nephews (Louvre, St Petersburg, Combe Abbey and Willin), and Lord Craven (National Portrait Gallery). His early form may be judged by a Lute-player (1614) at the Louvre, the Martyrdom of St John in S. M. della Scala at Rome, or the Liberation of Peter in the Berlin Museum; his latest style is that of the House in the Wood (1648), where he appears to disadvantage by the side of Jordaens and others.
Honthorst was succeeded by his brother William, born at Utrecht in 1604, who died, it is said, in 1666. He lived chiefly in his native place, temporarily at Berlin. But he has left little behind except a portrait at Amsterdam, and likenesses in the Berlin Museum of William and Mary of England.
HOOCH, PIETER DE (1629-?1678), Dutch painter, was born in 1629, and died in Amsterdam probably shortly after 1677. He was a native of Rotterdam, and wandered early to Haarlem and the Hague. In 1654 we find him again at Rotterdam, where in that year he married a girl of Delft, Jannetje van der Burch. From 1655 to 1657 he was a member of the painter’s gild of Delft, but after that date we have no traces of his doings until about 1668, when his presence is recorded in Amsterdam. His dated pictures prove that he was still alive in 1677, but his death followed probably soon after this year. De Hooch is one of the kindliest and most charming painters of homely subjects that Holland has produced. He seems to have been born at the same time and taught in the same school as van der Meer and Maes. All three are disciples of the school of Rembrandt. Houbraken mentions Nicolas Berchem as De Hooch’s teacher. De Hooch only once painted a canvas of large size, and that unfortunately perished in a fire at Rotterdam in 1864. But his small pieces display perfect finish and dexterity of hand, combined with great power of discrimination. Though he sometimes paints open-air scenes, these are not his favourite subjects. He is most at home in interiors illuminated by different lights, with the radiance of the day, in different intensities, seen through doors and windows. He thus brings together the most delicate varieties of tone, and produces chords that vibrate with harmony. The themes which he illustrates are thoroughly suited to his purpose. Sometimes he chooses the drawing-room where dames and cavaliers dance, or dine, or sing; sometimes—mostly indeed—he prefers cottages or courtyards, where the housewives tend their children or superintend the labours of the cook. Satin and gold are as familiar to him as camlet and fur; and there is no article of furniture in a Dutch house of the middle class that he does not paint with pleasure. What distinguishes him most besides subtle suggestiveness is the serenity of his pictures. One of his most charming was the canvas formerly in the Ashburton collection, now burnt, where an old lady with a dish of apples walks with a child along a street bounded by a high wall, above which gables and a church steeple are seen, while the sun radiates joyfully over the whole. Fine in another way is the “Mug of Beer” in the Amsterdam Museum, an interior with a woman coming out of a pantry and giving a measure of beer to a little girl. The light flows in here from a small closed window; but through the door to the right we look into a drawing-room, and through the open sash of that room we see the open air. The three lights are managed with supreme cunning. Beautiful for its illumination again is the “Music Party,” with its contending indoor and outdoor lights, a gem in the late A. Thieme collection at Leipzig. More subtly suggestive, in the museum of Berlin, is the “Mother seated near a Cradle.” “A Card Party,” dated 1658, at Buckingham Palace, is a good example of De Hooch’s drawing-room scenes, counterpart as to date and value of a “Woman and Child” in the National Gallery, and the “Smoking Party,” formerly in Lord Enfield’s collection. Another very fine example is the “Interior” with two women, bought by Sir Julius Wernher. Other pictures later in the master’s career are—the “Lady and Child in a Courtyard,” of 1665, in the National Gallery, and the “Lady receiving a Letter,” of 1670, in the Amsterdam Museum (Van der Hoop collection).
It is possible to bring together over 250 examples of De Hooch. There are three at St Petersburg, three in Buckingham Palace, three in the National Gallery, two in the Wallace Collection, six in the Amsterdam Museum, some in the Louvre and at Munich and Darmstadt; many others are in private galleries in England. For England was the first country to recognize the merit of De Hooch who only began to be valued in Holland in the middle of the 18th century. A celebrated picture at Amsterdam, sold for 450 florins in 1765, fetched 4000 in 1817, and in 1876 the Berlin Museum gave £5400 for a De Hooch at the Schneider sale—“A Dutch Dwelling-room” (820 B).
See Hofstede de Groot’s Catalogue raisonné, vol. i., London, 1907.
HOOD, JOHN BELL (1831-1879), American soldier, lieut.-general of the Confederate army, was born at Owingsville, Kentucky, in 1831, and graduated from West Point military academy in 1853. As an officer of the 2nd U.S. cavalry (Colonel Sidney Johnston) he saw service against Indians, and later he was cavalry instructor at West Point. He resigned from the U.S. service in 1861, and became a colonel in the Confederate army. He was soon promoted brigadier-general, and at the battle of Gaines’s Mill, where he was wounded, won the brevet of major-general for his gallant conduct. With the famous, “Texas brigade” of the Army of Northern Virginia he served throughout the campaign of 1862. At Gettysburg he commanded one of the divisions of Longstreet’s corps, receiving a wound which disabled his arm. With Longstreet he was transferred in the autumn of 1863 to the Army of Tennessee. At the battle of Chickamauga (September 19th, 20th) Hood was severely wounded again and his leg was amputated, but after six months he returned to duty undaunted. He remained with the Army of Tennessee as a corps commander, and when the general dissatisfaction with the Fabian policy of General J. E. Johnston brought about the removal of that officer, Hood was put in his place with the temporary rank of general. He had won a great reputation as a fighting general, and it was with the distinct understanding that battles were to be fought that he was placed at the head of the Army of Tennessee. But in spite of skill and courage he was uniformly unsuccessful in the battles around Atlanta. In the end he had to abandon the place, but he forthwith sought to attack Sherman in another direction, and finally invaded Tennessee. His march was pushed with the greatest energy, but he failed to draw the main body of the enemy after him, and, while Sherman with a picked force made his “March to the Sea,” Thomas collected an army to oppose Hood. A severe battle was fought at Franklin on the 30th of November, and finally Hood was defeated and his army almost annihilated in the battle of Nashville. He was then relieved at his own request (January 23rd, 1865). After the war he was engaged in business in New Orleans, where he died of yellow fever on the 30th of August 1879. His experiences in the Civil War are narrated in his Advance and Retreat (New Orleans, 1880). Hood’s reputation as a bold and energetic leader was well deserved, though his reckless vigour proved but a poor substitute for Johnston’s careful husbanding of his strength at this declining stage of the Confederacy.