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Leisure Time in an Elegant Setting

Artist:
Pieter de Hooch (Dutch, Rotterdam 1629–1684 Amsterdam)
Date:
ca. 1663–65
Medium:
Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
Extended canvas 22 15/16 x 27 5/16 in. (58.3 x 69.4 cm); original visible painted surface 21 5/8 x 26 in. (55 x 66 cm)
Classification:
Paintings
Credit Line:
Robert Lehman Collection, 1975
Accession Number:
1975.1.144
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 958
Like his contemporary Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch played a pioneering role in the advancement of genre painting in seventeenth century Holland. He was especially gifted as a painter of interiors--complex spatial arrangements stunningly beautiful in the manipulation of light. The Lehman picture is richly decorated with a marble floor and gilt-leather wall coverings, articulated by diffuse light from the window at left. The merry dialogue in the near ground is foiled by the mysterious encounter of a young man and elderly bearded figure in the antechamber and vestibule. De Hooch achieves extraordinary clarity and geometry in this grandly furnished chamber, qualities evocative of paintings he made in Amsterdam in the 1660s.
Inscription: Signed (on stretcher of chair): P. D. HOOCH
Probably Everill collection; Samuel S. Joseph, London by 1892; Mrs. Joseph, by 1907; [M. Knoedler and Co., London and New York], June 1911 (bought from Mrs. Joseph). Acquired by Philip Lehman from Knoedler in 1912.

Essays
The New York Dutch Room

Timelines
Low Countries, 1600–1800 A.D.

"The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art": The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 65, no. 1 (Summer, 2007)
Bartholomeus Spranger: Splendor and Eroticism in Imperial Prague
Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Volume I and II
European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born before 1865: A Summary Catalogue
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Masterpiece Paintings
The Robert Lehman Collection. Vol. 2, Fifteenth- to Eighteenth-Century European Paintings: France, Central Europe, The Netherlands, Spain, and Great Britain
Vermeer and the Delft School

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