De Hooch did domesticity so well that posterity has taken him, like his female subjects, very much for granted
NITS. IF THE word still foments dread among parents, rest assured that it was ever thus. In one of the best-loved works by Pieter de Hooch, painted around 1660, a small child kneels into a woman’s lap as she carefully, lovingly, delouses her hair. Known as “A Mother’s Duty” , the scene reframes a messy, intimate chore—of the sort that seldom found its way into valued art before the 17th-century Golden Age of Dutch painting—as a sacred rite of domesticity.
At the Prinsenhof, the self-effacing De Hooch, a bricklayer’s son from Rotterdam who disappears from all documents after 1679, steps back into the limelight. The world that comes into focus feels less cosily bourgeois than his reputation would suggest. His ideal Dutch homes turn out to be muted battlegrounds in which headlice might prove the least dangerous of foes.
With the landmark spires of Delft’s churches in the background, “A Woman and Child in a Bleaching Ground” shows that, in the 17th century, you could and should wash your dirty linen in public as a signal of inner as well as outer purity. This, though, is one of those mysterious paintings that complicate De Hooch and his art. For a start, as Wim Weve, another historian, has proved, there never was a bleaching-ground on that specific spot.
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